C H A P T E R I

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction

his book attempts to interpret what are to usin the industrialized world the exotic ideas of

some rural people in Colombia and Bolivia con-cerning the meaning of the capitalist relations ofproduction and exchange into which they are

daily being drawn. These peasants represent as vividly unnatural,even as evil, practices that most of us in commodity-based societieshave come to accept as natural in the everyday workings of oureconomy, and therefore of the world in general. This representationoccurs only when they are proletarianized and refers only to the wayof life that is organized by capitalist relations of production. It nei-ther occurs in nor refers to peasant ways of life.

Any work of interpretation includes elements of uncertainty andintellectual self-effacement. For what truth is being displayed byone's interpretation? Is it nothing more than a mediation betweenthe unfamiliar and the familiar? Assuredly, that is the more honest,if less grandiose, practice of the interpreter,- yet, in confronting theimplications of this practice we discern that the interpretation ofthe unfamiliar in terms of the familiar impugns the familiar itself.The truth of interpretation lies in its intellectual structure of con-trasts, and its reality is inherently self-critical.

So, although this work focuses on the cultural reactions of peas-ants to industrial capitalism and attempts to interpret those reac-tions, it is, inevitably, also an esoteric attempt to critically illumi-nate the ways by which those of us who are long accustomed tocapitalist culture have arrived at the point at which this familiaritypersuades us that our cultural form is not historical, not social, nothuman, but natural—"thing-like" and physical. In other words, it isan attempt forced upon us by confrontation with precapitalist cul-

T

4 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

tures to account for the phantom objectivity with which capitalistculture enshrouds its social creations.

Time, space, matter, cause, relation, human nature, and society it-self are social products created by man just as are the different typesof tools, farming systems, clothes, houses, monuments, languages,myths, and so on, that mankind has produced since the dawn ofhuman life. But to their participants, all cultures tend to presentthese categories as if they were not social products but elemen-tal and immutable things. As soon as such categories are defined asnatural, rather than as social, products, epistemology itself acts toconceal understanding of the social order. Our experience, our un-derstanding, our explanations—all serve merely to ratify the con-ventions that sustain our sense of reality unless we appreciate theextent to which the basic "building blocks" of our experience andour sensed reality are not natural but social constructions.

In capitalist culture this blindness to the social basis of essentialcategories makes a social reading of supposedly natural things deep-ly perplexing. This is due to the peculiar character of the abstrac-tions associated with the market organization of human affairs: es-sential qualities of human beings and their products are convertedinto commodities, into things for buying and selling on the market.Take the example of labor and labor-time. For our system of indus-trial production to operate, people's productive capacities and na-ture's resources have to be organized into markets and rationalizedin accord with cost accounting: the unity of production and humanlife is broken into smaller and smaller quantifiable subcomponents.Labor, an activity of life itself, thus becomes something set apartfrom life and abstracted into the commodity of labor-time, whichcan be bought and sold on the labor market. This commodity ap-pears to be substantial and real. No longer an abstraction, it appearsto be something natural and immutable, even though it is nothingmore than a convention or a social construction emerging from aspecific way of organizing persons relative to one another and to na-ture. I take this process as a paradigm of the object-making processin an industrial capitalist society: specifically, concepts such as la-bor-time are abstracted from the social context and appear to be realthings.

Of necessity, a commodity-based society produces such phan-tom objectivity, and in so doing it obscures its roots—the relationsbetween people. This amounts to a socially instituted paradox withbewildering manifestations, the chief of which is the denial by thesociety's members of the social construction of reality. Anothermanifestation is the schizoid attitude with which the members of

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction 5

such a society necessarily confront the phantom objects that havebeen thus abstracted from social life, an attitude that shows itself tobe deeply mystical. On the one hand, these abstractions are cher-ished as real objects akin to inert things, whereas on the other, theyare thought of as animate entities with a life-force of their own akinto spirits or gods. Since these "things" have lost their original con-nection with social life, they appear, paradoxically, both as inert andas animate entities. If the test of a first-rate intelligence is the abilityto hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still retain the abil-ity to function, then the modern mind can truly be said to haveproved itself. But this is testimony to culture, not to mind. E. E.Evans-Pritchard gives us an account of the category of time among apeople whose society is not organized by commodity production andmarket exchange, the Nuer of the Upper Nile.

Though I have spoken of time and units of time the Nuer haveno expression equivalent to "time" in our language, and theycannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it weresomething actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved,and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the samefeeling of fighting against time or having to coordinate ac-tivities with an abstract passage of time, because their pointsof reference are mainly the activities themselves, which aregenerally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order,but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there beingno autonomous points of reference to which activities have toconform with precision. Nuer are fortunate. [1940:103]

Time for these people is not abstracted from the tissue of lifeactivities, but is embedded in them. It is not clock time but whatwe could call human time: time is social relations. Yet, as Evans-Pritchard illustrates, we both abstract and actualize time. For us, asE. P. Thompson has vividly displayed using this same example, it isan abstraction, but also a substance, it passes, it can be wasted, itcan be saved, and so forth (1967). Moreover, it is animated: so wespeak of fighting against it. Time becomes a thing abstracted fromsocial relations because of the specific character of those social rela-tions, and it also becomes an animated substance. This I take to bebut a particular illustration of commodity fetishism, whereby theproducts of the interrelations of persons are no longer seen as such,but as things that stand over, control, and in some vital sense evenmay produce people. The task before us is to liberate ourselves fromthe fetishism and phantom objectivity with which society obscuresitself, to take issue with the ether of naturalness that confuses and

6 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

disguises social relations. The "natural" appearance of such thingshas to be exposed as a social product that can itself determine real-ity; thus, society may become master of its self-victimization.

In other words, rather than ask the standard anthropological ques-tion Why do people in a foreign culture respond in the way they doto, in this case, the development of capitalism? we must ask aboutthe reality associated with our society. For this is the question thattheir fantastic reactions to our nonfantastic reality force upon us, ifonly we have the wit to take heed. By turning the question this waywe allow the anthropologist's informants the privilege of explicat-ing and publicizing their own criticisms of the forces that are affect-ing their society—forces which emanate from ours. By this one stepwe free ourselves of the attitude that defines curious folk wisdom asonly fabulation or superstition. At the same time we become sensi-tive to the superstitions and ideological character of our own cul-ture's central myths and categories, categories that grant meaning asmuch to our intellectual products as to our everyday life. And it iswith the discomfort that such sensitivity breeds that we are forcedinto awareness of the commonplace and of what we take as natural.We are forced into casting aside the veil of naturalness that we havelaid as a pall over the process of social development, obscuring theone feature that distinguishes it from the process of natural develop-ment, the involvement of human consciousness. Thus, we are led tochallenge the normalcy given to our casting society in the realm ofnature. This is our praxis.

My motivation for writing stems both from the effects of fouryears of fieldwork and involvement in southwestern Colombia inthe early 19705 and from my belief that the socially conditionedtranslation of history and of the human quality of social relationsinto facts of nature desensitizes society and robs it of all that is in-herently critical of its inner form. Yet this translation is ubiquitousin modern society and nowhere more salient than in the "social sci-ences," in which the natural science model has itself become a natu-ral reflex, institutionally deployed as the guiding strategy for com-prehending social life, but which finally only petrifies it. My task,therefore, is to impugn this deployment, to convey something of the"feel" of social experience which the natural science paradigmobscures, and in so doing to construct a criticism that is directedagainst the petrification of social life by positivist doctrines, which Isee as uncritical reflections of society's disguised appearance.

Confronted with this modern mode of comprehension it is all tooeasy to slip into other forms of idealism, and also into an uncriticalnostalgia for times past when human relations were not seen as ob-

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstiuction j

ject-relations beholden to marketing strategies. Because the ethno-graphy with which I am dealing pertains largely to what are some-times called precapitalist societies, these dangers become pressingproblems. For such social formations easily seduce in precisely thisproblematic way the mind trained and honed by capitalist institu-tions. Set against the images that capitalist society presents of itself,precapitalist life can appeal (or frighten) on account of its apparentidealism and the enchantment of its universe by spirits and phan-toms that display the course of the world and its salvation. Further-more, precapitalist societies acquire the burden of having to satisfyour alienated longings for a lost Golden Age.

Faced with the unsatisfactory and indeed politically motivatedparadigms of explanation that have been insinuated into the mentalfiber of modern capitalist society—its mechanical materialism aswell as its alienated forms in religion and nostalgia—what coun-terstrategy is available for the illumination of reality that does notin some subtle way replicate its ruling ideas, its dominant passions,and its enchantment of itself? As I see it, this question is both neces-sary and Utopian. It is essential to pose the challenge, but it is Uto-pian to believe that we can imagine our way out of our culture with-out acting on it in practical ways that alter its social infrastructure.For this reason, what I call negative criticism is all that is possible,apt, and demanded at the intellectual level. This implies that we ad-here to a mode of interpretation that is unremittingly aware of itsprocedures and categories,- thus, our thought is exposed to itself as aprocess of escalating self-criticism in which self-consciousness fi-nally establishes itself in the realm of the concrete phenomena thatinitiated our inquiry and led to the first empirical abstractions anddistortions of it. But if the mode of comprehension that we espouseis this ever-widening network of self-aware description of the con-crete, then it must also be clearly understood, as Fredric Jamesonhas insisted, that this self-awareness must be acutely sensitive tothe social roots and historicity of the abstractions that we employ atany stage of the process (1971).

This self-awareness prefigures the concept of culture and the the-ory of perception that I employ, as invoked by Sidney Hook's earlyinterpretation of Marxist epistemology. "What is beheld in percep-tion," he writes, "depends just as much upon the perceiver as uponthe antecedent causes of perception. And since the mind meets theworld with a long historical development behind it, what it sees, itsselective reaction, the scope and manner of its attention are to be ex-plained, not merely as physical or biological fact, but as social fact aswell" (1933 :89). It is, of course, the peculiar and specific character of

8 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

social relations in market society that has facilitated the insensitiv-ity, if not blindness, to this position, so that the scope and manner ofthe mind's attention is explained only as physical or biological fact,and not as social fact, as well. In other words, the social fact worksin our consciousness to deny itself and to be consumed in the physi-cal and biological.

In Franz Boas's anthropology we find further support for the con-cept of culture that I wish to use. In highlighting one of Boas's earlypapers, George W. Stocking, Jr., writes, that this paper "sees culturalphenomena in terms of the imposition of conventional meaning onthe flux of experience. It sees them as historically conditioned andtransmitted by the learning process. It sees them as determinants ofour very perceptions of the external world" (1968 :159). But Boas'sconception is denuded of the tension that is imparted by the mean-ing of modern history that conditions the learning process. It is notjust that our perception is historically conditioned, that the eye be-comes here an organ of history, that sensations are a form of activityand not passive carbon copies of externals, but that the history thatinforms this activity also informs our understanding of seeing and ofhistory itself. And the most forceful and cloying legacy of modernhistory shaping our experience and therefore our conceptual tools isundoubtedly the alienated relations of person to nature, of subjec-tivity to its object, and the relations that are formed by social class,by commodity production, and by market exchange. The abstrac-tions we bring to bear on any concrete phenomena will of necessityreflect these alienated relations, but in being aware of this and itsimplications and in raising it to our consciousness, we can choosewhether we will continue to disguise the categories unthinkingly asmanifestations of the natural or whether we will reveal them in alltheir intensity as the evolving product of mutual human relations,albeit concealed by their reified appearance in a society based oncommodity production.

The recognition of this choice is the first essential of the histor-ically sensitive dialectician, who must then proceed to work a wayout of the socially stamped validation of social facts as physical andautonomous entities akin to immutable and natural things. Marxstruggles with this paradox in his analysis of the commodity as botha thing and a social relation, from whence he derives his concept ofcommodity fetishism as a critique of capitalist culture: the animateappearance of commodities provides testimony to the thing-like ap-pearance of persons, appearances that dissolve once it is pointed outthat the definitions of man and of society are market inspired. Sim-ilarly, Karl Polanyi berates the market mentality and the market

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction 9

way of seeing the world in his concept of the commodity fiction. It isa fiction, he states, that land and labor are things produced for sale."Labor is only another name for a human activity that goes with lifeitself," and "land is only another name for nature, which is not pro-duced by man" (1957:72). Yet in a market organized society this fic-tion becomes reality, and the system of names that Polanyi drawsupon loses its meaning. In its market form society engenders thisfictional reality, and it is with these abstractions or symbols that weare forced to operate and comprehend the world.

Yet, to overcome the reifictions imposed on thought by the mar-ket organization of reality, it is not enough to realize that the reifiedappearance of social products is symbolic of social relations. For insuch a society symbols acquire peculiar properties, and the social re-lations signified are far from being transparent. Unless we also real-ize that the social relations symbolized in things are themselves dis-torted and self-concealing ideological constructs, all we will haveachieved is the substitution of a naive mechanical materialism byan equally naive objective idealism ("symbolic analysis"), which re-ifies symbols in place of social relations. The social relations thatthe analyst reads in the symbols, the collective representations, andthe objects that fill our daily life are more often than not conven-tions about social relations and human nature that society paradesas its true self. I think this is particularly clear with Emile Durk-heim and neo-Durkheimians such as Mary Douglas who analyzesymbols and collective representations as emanations of somethingthey call "social structure," reify structure, and in so doing uncrit-ically accept society's distorted projection of itself. The point is thatwe can abandon mechanical materialism and become aware thatfacts and things stand in some way as signs for social relations. Wethen look for the meaning of these signs in this way. But unless werealize that the social relations thus signified are themselves signsand social constructs defined by categories of thought that are alsothe product of society and history, we remain victims of and apolo-gists for the semiotic that we are seeking to understand. To peel offthe disguised and fictional quality of our social reality, the analysthas the far harder task of working through the appearance thatphenomena acquire, not so much as symbols, but as the outcomeof their interaction with the historically produced categories ofthought that have been imposed on them. Karl Marx directs our at-tention to this where he writes that the signs or "characters thatstamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a nec-essary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have alreadyacquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life,

io Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for inhis eyes they are immutable, but their meaning" (1967, 1:75).

Artfully mediating the self-validating categories of their epoch,the political economists gave voice and force to a symbolic systemin the guise of an economic analysis. The meaning of value, symbol-ized by money, presupposed for them the universal and naturalvalidity of the signs and abstractions engendered by the marketmechanism. They presupposed a commoditized world and this pre-supposition persists today as the natural way of viewing social life.Conditioned by history and society, the human eye assumes its per-ceptions to be real. It cannot, without great effort, contemplate itsperception as a movement of thought that ratifies the signs throughwhich history expresses itself. But to the critic who can stand out-side this mutually confirming system of signs the money form ofthe world of the commodities is the sign that conceals the social re-lations hidden in the abstractions that society takes to be naturalphenomena.

Because the cultures with which this book is concerned are notmarket organized but market dominated, we are provided with anopportunity to adopt this very same critical stance. Certain humanrealities become clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system,making it easier for us to brush aside the commoditized apprehen-sion of reality. Marx expressed this potential that lies within theanthropologist's grasp as a source of great power for demotivatingthe links of meaning that commodity production engendered in theminds of its participants. "The whole mystery of commodities,"he wrote in the famous chapter dealing with the fetishism of com-modities, wherein he assailed the principal categories of bourgeoisthought, "all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the prod-ucts of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, van-ishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production."

With the aid of some of these "other forms of production" thisbook therefore attempts to interpret capitalist forms of comprehen-sion of social reality. My strategy is to view certain fantastic andmagical reactions to our nonfantastic reality as part of a critique ofthe modern mode of production. It would be a mistake to emphasizethe exotic quality of the reactions of these peasants if, by virtue ofsuch an emphasis, we overlook the similar beliefs and ethical con-demnations that characterized much economic thought in the his-tory of Western culture down to the end of the Middle Ages, if notbeyond. From Aristotle through the teachings of the early ChristianFathers to the Schoolmen a similar hostility toward usury, profiteer-

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstiuction 11

ing, and unjust exchange can be found. However, this hostility wasintensified and became associated with the belief in the devil onlyin the late Middle Ages, the same time that capitalism was on therise.

Societies on the threshold of capitalist development necessarilyinterpret that development in terms of precapitalist beliefs and prac-tices. This is nowhere more florid than in the folk beliefs of thepeasants, miners, seafarers, and artisans who are involved in thetransition process. Their culture, like their work, organically con-nects soul with hand, and the world of enchanted beings that theycreate seems as intensely human as the relations that enter intotheir material products. The new experience of commodity produc-tion fragments and challenges that organic interconnection. Yet themeaning of that mode of production and of the contradictions that itnow poses is inevitably assimilated into patterns that are preestab-lished in the group's culture. Those patterns will be changed, to besure, but not until the commodity economy has created a new epis-temology in which the soul itself becomes either a commodity or adeeply alienated spirit and disenchantment sets in. Until the newspirit, the spirit of capitalism, displaces the creations of the imag-ination that give meaning to life in the precapitalist world, until thenew "rules of the game" are assimilated, the fabulations that thecommodity engenders will be subject to quite different sorts of fan-tasy formation. In short, the meaning of capitalism will be subject toprecapitalist meanings, and the conflict expressed in such a con-frontation will be one in which man is seen as the aim of produc-tion, and not production as the aim of man.

Although the insights that are intrinsic to such a reaction seeminevitably to pass away with time and the progressive institutional-ization of capitalist structures and common sense eventually ac-cepts the new conditions as natural ones, certain bodies of thought,as well as enormous social movements, have kept them alive andfunctioning as a critical world force. Marxism and Marxist revolu-tionary movements in the modern era represent the "rationaliza-tion" of the early precapitalist outrage at the expansion of the cap-italist system. In this sense Tawney was justified when he referredto Marx as "the last of the Schoolmen." Emphasizing this com-monality between Marxism and the precapitalist hostility towardthe flowering of the market economy, we must not forget that theyalso share epistemological features, as well as an anticapitalist mor-alism and a lauding of the producers' ethic. This common epistemo-logical basis is all too easily overlooked because it is precisely this

12 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

level of thought and culture that is most taken for granted, althoughit tenaciously permeates and guides interpretation, including the in-terpretation of Marxism itself.

Marxism, as it has come to be generally understood in the West,has itself been deeply influenced by that stream of modern thoughtthat is loosely referred to as positivism, and even more loosely butmore vividly as vulgar materialism. The mechanistic concepts ofontology and epistemology through which reality is understood asmaterial atoms that interact in accordance with mathematical lawshave progressively undermined the critical impetus of Marxism,which was originally based on a synthetic and dialectical under-standing of reality in accordance with the Hegelian tradition, albeitsharply qualified by the idea that the content of logic is historical. Ifwe are ever to plumb the full significance of the hostility and theperception of unnaturalness that capitalism can engender among itsnew work force, we must return to this tradition of the dialecticaland historical method, which underscores the role of consciousnessin social development, in order to empower the social developmentof critical consciousness.

If there is an overall aim today that is both intellectually and mor-ally commendable in the mission that is anthropology—the "studyof man"—it is not only that the study of other societies reveals theway in which they are influenced by ours but also that such inves-tigations provide us with some critical leverage with which to assessand understand the sacrosanct and unconscious assumptions thatare built into and emerge from our social forms. It is with thisclearly in mind that the following pages have been written concern-ing the view of nature and man revealed to us by these rural peoplein South America who are now undergoing the travail of proletari-anization.

C H A P T E R 3

Slave Religion and the Rise ofthe Free Peasantry

wo generalizations are necessary to any discus-sion of black slave religion in Latin America.

;irst, the whites were apprehensive of the super-latural powers of their subjects, and vice versa.Second, religion was inseparable from magic,

and both permeated everyday life—agriculture, mining, economy,healing, marital affairs, and social relations in general. The Inquisi-tion, for instance, regarded the occult arts that were drawn from thethree continents not as idle fantasies but as the exercise of super-natural powers, including an explicit or implicit pact with the devil.The African slaves brought their mysteries and sorcery, the Indianstheir occult powers to cure or kill, and the colonists their own beliefin magic (Lea, 1908:462).

The magical lore of the European was joined to that of the de-spised African and Indian to form a symbiosis, transformation, andadaptation of forms unknown to each group. This process was mostobvious in beliefs concerning illness and healing. The Europeanshad few efficacious medical resources, and their curing dependedheavily on religious and magical faith: masses, prayers to the saints,rosary beads, holy water, and miracles wrought by priests and folkcurers. The indoctrination of African slaves by Catholic priests fo-cused on curing, which exploited the miracle-yielding power of theChristian pantheon to the utmost (Sandoval, 1956). Conversely, theEuropeans availed themselves of their subjects' magic, which wasnot distinguished from religion. In fact, the Europeans defined Af-rican and Indian religion not merely as magic but as evil magic. "It isin this trance," writes Gustavo Otero, referring to the first days of

Ti

42 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

the conquest, "that the conquerors became the conquered" (1951:128). That restless dialectic of magical counterattributions persists inpopular culture to the present day.

Colonization and enslavement inadvertently delivered a specialmystical power to the underdog of colonial society—the power ofmystic evil as embodied in the Christians' fear of the devil. Thequasi-Manichaean dualistic cosmology of the conquerors coexistedwith the polytheistic or animistic monism of the African slaves andIndians, so that the conquerors stood to the conquered as God didto the devil. Thus, the popular religion of Spanish America wasstamped with ethnic and class dualisms of this momentous order—ever susceptible to mercurial inversions in accordance with theshifting currents of caste and class power.

The Inquisition was founded in Cartagena in the early seventeenthcentury for reasons that included the Church Fathers' judgment ofthe colony as the "most vicious and sinful in the Spanish Dominions,[with] the faith on the point of destruction" (Lea, 1908 :456). Femaleslaves served as healers to such exalted personages as the bishop ofCartagena and the inquisitors themselves, while others were lashedwhen their occult powers were defined as evil, especially when epi-demics of witchcraft were raging. Male sorcerers (bru/'os) became im-portant leaders in the runaway slave camps (palenques} which causedthe authorities endless concern (Borrego Pla, 1973 :27, 83; Tejado Fer-nandez, 1954:117-32). As intermediaries for Satan, such leaders sup-posedly initiated their converts in a ritual that mocked Christian bap-tism and denied God, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in order toachieve salvation in the afterlife and wealth and power in the here andnow. This system of belief expresses the specter of social inversion.Teleologically ordered by the Supreme God, the hierarchy of socialforms defined by class, color, and sex engendered its mirror image inthe fears or hopes of an underworld allied with Satan.

Blacks were notorious for their militantly anti-Christian out-bursts, which were macabrely ritualized in the sine qua non of slav-ery, flogging; at such times it was not unusual for the victim to cry, "Idenounce God!" (Medina, 1889:106; cf., Palmer, 1975). They also de-stroyed symbols of the church—hardly surprising in a society inwhich, for example, a woman slave owner might measure the dura-tion of a flogging by the time it took her to recite her rosary (Meikle-john, 1968:216).

Writing in 1662, the chief inquisitor attributed much of the sorceryand idolatry in the mining districts to the heedless materialism of themineowners, who "live only for profit. . . and keep watch only that

Devil and Cosmogenesis of Capitalism 97

culture's concept of cosmogony and on the meaning this conceptcreates when confronted with the radical transformation of the so-ciety's mode of production.

Let us first consider situations in which such a contract is sup-posed not to occur: peasants working their own plots or those ofother peasants for wages,- women, even when engaged in proletarianlabor; market vendors; and the Pacific coast immigrants back homein the relatively self-subsistent nonmarket economy of the coast.

The Coast

Munecos are a customary item of magic on the Pacific coast of Co-lombia, from where many migrants working in the valley come. Butthey are not used as they are alleged to be used in the valley's planta-tions. Instead, people use them in curing rites, as protection againsttheft, and as protection against sorcery. They are used not for gainbut for alleviation of misfortune and for protection. In fact gain iswhat leads to illness and misfortune. As one anthropologist describ-ing coastal black culture has written, "The resulting ethic is the an-tithesis of success" (Pavy, 1967:279)—"success" being viewed hereas market achievement.

On the coast blacks sometimes make recourse to Indian shamans,and it appears that Indians have absorbed some African magic too. S.Henry Wassen claims to have discerned African features in some ofthe equipment used by Choco Indian shamans, especially their cur-ing figurines (1940:75-76). The figurines offer strong testimony ofthe plasticity of tradition and of the magical power of foreign influ-ence, for in addition to dolls with African features there are dollsthat are carved in the form of Europeans of the colonial period andothers influenced by icons of Catholic saints. It is likely that thedolls referred to in the proletarian devil contract in the Cauca Valleyare descendants or transformations of these same figurines, whichembody the tutelary spirits of the shaman. It bears noting that thegeneral cultural area surrounding the Cauca Valley at the time whenAfrican slavery was introduced was one in which the use of such fig-urines was common. Moreover, Nils M. Holmer and Wassen havenoted the widespread distribution of these figurines among Indiancultures ranging across the north of South America from the Pacificcoast to the Atlantic (1953 .'84-90), and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoffstates that the Choco Indians, inhabiting the northern half of theColombian Pacific coast, formerly inhabited many regions inlandand that even today some small groups have survived east of theCauca River (1961:23o).

98 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Drawing on the pioneering work of Holmer and Wassen, Reichel-Dolmatoff describes the use of dolls by Cuna and Choco Indian sha-mans. Made from wood or clay in the form of humans or; less com-monly, of animals (often distorted), the dolls form a central role incuring by exorcizing animal spirits or the influence of a vengefulshaman that has abducted the soul of the patient. Among the moreaccultured Choco Indians, most disease-afflicting spirits are thoughtof as spirits of the dead, and Indians under mission influence refer tosuch spirits as devils (Ibid.: 229-41, 494).

Reichel-Dolmatoff argues against those anthropologists who at-tribute a fertility function to the use of these dolls. In his opiniontheir use in pregnancy is not to increase fertility or to magically in-duce reproduction. Instead, they are critical to the ritual regulationof the process, concerned with preventing malfunction during repro-duction. The Cuna Indian curing song and rite employed to relieveobstructed birth, published by Holmer and Wassen (1953) and madefamous by Claude Levi-Strauss in his essay "The Effectiveness ofSymbols" (19673), support this claim in full. Thus, insofar as there isa resemblance, we must be alert to the implication that the use ofthe dolls in the Cauca Valley plantations is not to be explained pri-marily as a desire to increase yield; it is the regulation of a dan-gerous process that is at issue.

This raises the importance of the analogy between production andreproduction. In use-value economies production is often meta-phorized as reproduction, and both spheres are understood or ex-pressed in the same ontogenetic concepts. Aristotle and the School-men constantly extended the concepts of biological reproduction tothe spheres of material production, exchange, and monetary ex-change. Like these philosophers, the lower classes of the southernCauca Valley find that metaphors and symbols in one sphere readilypertain to the other: for example, increasing production under incip-ient capitalist relations of production yields barrenness in natureand lack of reproductive power in wages gained. Interestingly, theeveryday parlance of mature capitalist economics also utilizes bio-logical metaphors (the "growth" of capital, factories referred to as"plants," and so forth), but these metaphors exalt capital by endow-ing it with fertility.

The Local Peasants

It is crucial to realize that the local peasantry are not thought tomake contracts with the devil to augment productivity on their ownplots. The logic of the belief preordains this. As the peasants point

C H A P T E R 8

The Devil in the Mines

n the shafts of the tin mines in the mountainsaround the city of Oruro, Bolivia, the miners havestatues representing the spirit who owns the minesand tin. Known as the devil or as the uncle (Tio),these icons may be as small as a hand or as large as a

full-sized human. They hold the power of life and death over themines and over the miners, who conduct rites of sacrifice and giftexchange to the spirit represented by the icons—the contemporarymanifestation of the precolonial power of the mountain (Nash,1976:27; Costas Arguedas, 1961, 2:303-4).

His body is sculptured from mineral. The hands, face, and legs aremade from clay. Often, bright pieces of metal or light bulbs from theminers' helmets form his eyes. The teeth may be of glass or of crys-tal sharpened like nails, and the mouth gapes, awaiting offerings ofcoca and cigarettes. The hands stretch out for liquor. In the Siglo XXmine the icon has an enormous erect penis. The spirit can also ap-pear as an apparition: a blond, bearded, red-faced gringo (foreigner)wearing a cowboy hat, resembling the technicians and administra-tors who control the tens of thousands of miners who excavate thetin that since the late nineteenth century has made Bolivia a satel-lite of the world commodity market. He can also take the form of asuccubus offering riches in exchange for one's soul or life (Nash,1972).

Without the goodwill of this spirit, effected through ritual, bothmineral production and the miners' lives are imperiled. To say theleast, this spirit owner of the mines is extraordinarily ambivalent,representing the force of life and the force of death; as the politicaland economic context changes, so does his ambivalence. Followingthe revolutionary changes and state nationalization of the mines in1952, personalistic private ownership by the tin barons was replaced

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144 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

by stultifying bureaucratic control and military dictatorship, which,in some ways, has made the struggle over workers' control evenmore arduous and critical than it was in the days of the tin barons.Since the military takeover in 1964, the miners' rites to the spiritowner of the mine have been suppressed. Asserting that they impedeprogress, some miners think that these rites are better forgotten.Others claim the opposite and maintain that the management sup-pressed the rites because they sustain proletarian solidarity and thehigh level of revolutionary consciousness for which the miningareas are famous.

Each change in the mode of production and each new develop-ment of political struggle add new meanings and transformations tothe symbolization and understanding of the spirit owner of nature.In the peasant communities of the Andean plateau, where, individu-ally and communally, the tillers of the soil exercise a measure of realcontrol over the means of production, the spirit owners of nature dif-fer from those in the mines, where the capitalist mode of productionreigns. In peasant communities, also, the spirit owners hold thepower of life and death over people and over resources. Especiallyimportant are the mountain spirit owners, which are often person-ified, but never sculptured. But they do not bear the actively evilcharacter of the spirit of the mines, and rites to them are far less fre-quent. In peasant life the mountain spirit owners are embodied innatural icons, such as crags or boulders, whose vitality and whole-ness ensure the vitality and solidarity of the community residing onthe mountain slopes. Rites of sacrifice and gift exchange with themountain spirit owners exemplify and ratify these beliefs. Theyensure the smooth flow of production, which is aimed mainly atself-subsistence and exists largely outside of capitalist market ex-change. By feeding the mountain spirit, peasant producers ensurethat the mountain spirits will feed them. Gift exchange with thespirits ensures that the spirits will reciprocate with gifts of life forthe peasants. In communities that are relatively isolated from com-mercial trade and commercial culture, the understanding and repre-sentation of the mountain spirit owners respond more to Indianmotifs and benevolence than they do in peasant communities thatare not so isolated. The ambivalence of the spirit owners is alwayspresent. They can harm as much as help. But ritual gift exchangecan channel this ambivalence into a favorable outcome.

Only in the mines, honeycombed mountains of capitalist organi-zation, does the spirit owner seem predominantly and actively evil.There, rites to the spirit owner are necessary and frequent; yet, tryas they might, the miners are constantly on the verge of failure de-