Berghahn Books

THE RISE AND FALL OF MARXIST ANTHROPOLOGY

Author(s): Michael Taussig
Source: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 21
(August 1987), pp. 101-113
Published by: Berghahn Books
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Social Analysis
No. 21, August 1987

THE RISE AND FALL OF MARXIST ANTHROPOLOGY

Michael Taussig

How painful it is to read the reviews in Social Analysis (No. 19,1986) of The Devil and
Commodity Fetishism in South America, especially if you're its author (and haven't read
the book in seven years) ! With the exception of the relaxed, charming and critically helpful
review by Roberto DaMatta (the only South American and clearly non-Marxist in the

bunch), and some tortuously ingenious alternative interpretations advanced in the only

intellectually serious contribution, that of Terry Turner (1986), these reviews are

exemplary for the way their petulance displays not merely the dangers of which DaMatta
warns (1986), namely the 'neutral' confrontation of egos, but even more drearily the
institutional sclerosis and terrible failure of the imagination that has befallen what has,
over the past decade or so, been known as Marxist Anthropology.
I will deal with theegos and their envy first, then with what I call 'redemptive

listening' in which I try to sketch an alternative form of Marxist anthropologizing as

cultural oppositional practice, and I will conclude with a terse delineation of the self
destruction of Marxist Anthropology in our time.

Envy in the Academic and Peasant Modes of Production

Now I would have thought that the first thing Marxist critics should do is, like Roberto
— their — in the case
DaMatta, figure out their critical practice theory of reviewing which,
of a Marxist, as Walter Benjamin goes to some pains to point out in his essay on Eduard
Fuchs, means taking into account the impossibility of directly confronting a work of art
outside of the critical reception associated with it. (Benjamin indicated elsewhere that
"the work is the death-mask of its conception", but that is the author's, not the reviewer's
dilemma, so it seems to me). And this impossibility reflects the close parallel that exists
between the
peasant and academic modes of production under capitalism and state

capitalism. Here I am thinking not merely of the force of patron-clientage, impassioned

rivalries, and the resort to formal courtesies of collegiality that academics muster, but of
the sorcery and use of the devil in such sorcery so as to maim, if not kill, the envied Other —
as 1 learnt about such things in my years in academia (the principality of pettiness) and in
the southwest of Colombiamany are the terrors that reign, not all picked
where up by
Amnesty International.of course, Now
the devil has been around a long time — like the
of the starless — but
opacity night, like men, women, and the warming rays of the rising sun
that does not mean he cannot be used to figure new turns in the epic of humanity that is

History. In fact his venerable age assures him his rightful place in such acts of figuration,
whether it be in the pacts that the sorcerer, on the part of the envious, makes with him so as
to destroy the Other, or whether he serves in a more diffuse process of representation of
victimization and of hope as felt, if not pictured, in the understanding that rural proletaria
nization creates amongst poor country people still retaining earthly and imaginative
attachment to modes of livelihood not directly dependent on the buying and selling of
labour a commodity.
as Like the work of art, the devil cannot be critically evaluated
outside of his critical reception, and so it is with The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in
South America whose very 'success' has made it the target of an all-consuming passion of
the envious. Take this succulent morsel by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, preceded as it is by his

declaiming that "here lies the most

important issue":
Chevalier's work
represents a minor trend both in anthropology and m Marxist
studies, while Taussig fits quite well within the current "normal science", as a
"Marxist" [note the quotation marks] version of the discourse on reflexivity.
Chevalier tackles his data, his concepts, willing to make a mess here and there,
worried (and indeed too often apologetic) about his own conclusions. The

problem with his book is that we are too much aware of the difficulties that

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 marked its production; we do not end where we started, but we are not sure
where we end. With Taussig, we know: we've known all along. Taussig's book is
about the West — the expression of a West dissatisfied (partly) with capitalism,
dissatisfied (also) with Marxism, and willing to impose the melancholy so
engendered on the reality experienced by other peoples. I suppose its
Rousseau-like flavour makes many liberal readers feel good; and that should
account for its current commercial success. But, as Marx would put it, that is
part of the magic of all commodities: through the process of commodification,

they mask the logic of their production and become transcendent. It's a bit like

trading indulgences to cover the cost of Michaelangelo's paintings (1986: 89).

And here the outburst spends itself.

Against the masking beauty of painting, the transparent virtue of work; as against the
work of the imaginary, the working of reality. What could be more simple? Or more

deadly?
Which is why in certain homes in the southweat of Colombia we take vision-inducing
medicines with a curer— 'painting', it is called — to see what it is that's this terrible
creating
envy and in naming and picturing it, turn it back to its source. Night falls. The medicine is

passed around the group. The river roars. The wind murmurs. And the throats of an
infinitude of frogs secure in their millennial mud begin to vibrate the world of the image
realm into
being. We see something taking shape, something piously Lutheran and Godly
criticalabout selling indulgences . . . Work, yes that's the good one, lots and lots of work
so dear to capitalism, so dear to U.S. academe, work that makes reality real, work that
makes 'the economy' real, lots and lots of work . . . he's done piece work in Brooklyn,
and there's piece work in Miami, in the gaols of the U.S., piecework in the cane fields of the
southern Cauca valley . . . and what's this! Ah! Of course! "Good old fashioned
fieldwork"! That's the shot! Not
for Michel-Rolph the swiss cheese unreal reality of (mere)
stories of devil-pacts in the cane fields. For reasons never given, he asserts it of the utmost

significance to ascertain if they really occur(ed). This is the sweat of the epistemic anxiety
of Realism confronted with the politics of Murk, the salient principle of modern times
under capitalism and state capitalism. "Don't get so nervous!" one feels like saying, "Stay
calm, learn to weave and duck with the certain uncertainty of (mere) stories. What
difference would it make if not
one devil-pact was 'really' made?" As for "good old
fashioned fieldwork" coming to epistemology's aid, don't you mean something like spying
on people their backs, the back of (mere) — for their own
behind appearance (given to us)
good, of course. Isn't that what fieldwork is? And, let's face it, the fascination of the Other
- lower class, dependent, and of darker hue whose task it has been for quite some
generally
time, to fill, via the anthropologist's fieldwork, that spiritual vacuum of middle class
culture. For their own good, of course. Should 1 nose my way into secretive rites — and
reveal them, of course? Methinks I've done enough of that sort of thing. And, by the way,
when you quote the devil as saying
book "it does not matter" whether the devil pact is

really performed, why don't you continue with the very next sentence, "However, it can be
stated that devil contracts are really made . . ." I do hope good old fashioned fieldwork is
conducted with more care than the reading and exploitation of this text. But now the

searing dots and dashes of colour rip against the river's rush, absorbing us. Meaning drifts.
Then looms the phrase, "Taussig's work fits quite well within the current 'normal science',
as a 'Marxist' version of the discourse on reflexivity". Come on! Haven't you conducted
good old fashioned fieldwork at the AAA recently? Tell us about 'normal science'
there!
And as we waitfor the reply, other images impetuously clamour for attention, jostling
crescendo . . . "reality, . . is
the curer's song into a faster and louder reality, reality
what we hear with tears and see a figure being pushed forward. Why! It's Chevalier being
used as a foil to make a dualism every bit as primordial and "Romantic" as the dualism of
which the devil is being
book accused of making between peasant production and

production. before Butwe get to that dualism let us try to figure out what is
plantation
done Can we say he's speaking
to Chevalier. for himself? Or is he being used to
being
sustain a philosophy of language and writing claiming that opaque and abstract writing
Althusserian impenetrability with post-structural equivocation is the mark of
combining
an "honesty" and of a "humility" that, unlike the "convincing eloquence" of Taussig,

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ensures a text open and transparent to real reality — as if opaque writing of the honest and
humble variety was not also a mode of rhetoric. And what could be more "Romantic"! The
honest for truth, forgotten
struggler and marginalized, against whom we have the

(allegedly) commercially successful Taussig-text of the devil. "Ah! La envidia está en todas
partes", chuckles the curer. And vomits. Slowly the song starts again to reach a peak and
the rushing images are condensing into one, One Big Word . . . In the beginning was the
. . . economy. Ah! Yes! At long last something solid, some bedrock, not at all like

Michaelangelo's paintings, together with a sock it to 'em quotation from some real
working guys, U.S. (Marxist) economists, to the effect some un
(apparently) that there's
macho types going around saying 'culture' is more important than 'the economy'. (It seems
like there's some sort of competition going on.) The curer is leaning forward, gasping for
breath between his retching, "Didn't Karl Marx and a lot of others after him like . . . Karl
Korsch and Karl Polanyi . . . claim
economy' that 'the
was a capitalist category for

sustaining the construction of the

we all vomit. real?" And
The song has stopped for a
while and in the silence broken only by this gut-opening consciousness it seems that to get
any more curing you have to figure out a way by which you can trip up capitalist categories
while being forced to live by them. Not so simple. "Ah! Now I see!", chuckles the curer.
"You also forgot to cite the right people. Even just a mention in the bibliography would
have done. You know, the people who fill the journals of peasant studies and such with
fearsomely correct lines about modes of production and reproduction and how to define
peasants and reconstituted peasants and . . His voice trailed off in a peal of laughter.
"You're in real trouble, boy. They're gonna make mince-meat out of you". And his laughter
is cut short by more vomiting. "You can't be serious", I protest, as dark and menacing
shapes start to swim into sight. "I'm serious", he replies. "Can't you see I'm laughing?
That's what academics are like. I've heard of this for a long time now. And, anyway, you
didn't even
get their permission. Didn't you know Caribbean studies was all tied up, the
funding and the islands, each one with its owner, all for the good of the people, of course.
But basically your mistake was not to sing their praises because that's how you get power,
while raising theirs, you know, the sort of thing I do with my singing. Only it's easier for you
because the ones you should sing to are so small, whereas the ones I sing to are so big. You
know", he said thoughtfully as he waved
his curing fan absent-mindedly back and forth
towards the empty darkness of the
sky, "the sort you have to sing to are like the Malay
concepts of spirits as described by don Kirk Endicott. Remember where he's talking about

spirits whose goodwill is sought by magicians? They're thought to be stupid and their
emotional reactions are simple and basic. They are easily tricked by bribes and threats in
return for gifts. But even though they can be controlled like this, you have always to
remember that they are very sensitive to what they see as an insult. Even a thoughtless
remark or oversight can madden them to revenge. Check it out when you get back to
academia — An Analysis Clarendon
Endicott, of Malay Magic, Press, Oxford, 1970, page
55. On the other hand", and he paused to wipe clean his mouth, "if I had to choose between

curing the envy that goes on in academia and that in peasant farming I'd choose the

peasant sort any day. Nasty as it is, it's nothing by comparison with what goes on between
those alpha males in the halls of learning". He laughed, somewhat tired, I thought. "It's not
'
knowledge, you know, it's like what I do, power-knowledge that can cure or kill. Chei H
out. It's that simple".

"Listening": Explanation As Redemption

It was
this complicity of the ostensible critique with capitalist common sense that
stuck in my mind as I stumbled out into the cool night air to be on my own for a while. The
way so much that passes for Marxist radical thought turns out to be nothing more than

everyday materialism, as American as Apple Pie, and the way that Trouillot, and
McEachern and Mayer, in their Social Analysis reviews advance the notion, for instance,
that the devil story could
pact be, or is, something to "maintain average productivity" or
"
"deter 'rate on the part of piece-rate
busting' workers. Is this not simply the application
on the reviewers' — the
of a cardinal principle of capitalist sense-making part good old fall
back to the 'logic of maximization', which earned the undying scorn of Karl Polanyi, T. W.

Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, for example? In any event, it certainly would be difficult

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(as the devil book emphasises) to uphold these arguments about piece-rate workers given
that women (piece-rate) workers in the plantations and that piece-rate workers of either
sex in the peasant plots were said not to make such pacts. More important even than this,
though, is the way such a mode of explanation censors what we might call 'the excess' left
adrift by its own technique; the way that the entire problem of the relation between art and
economy, stories and capitalist practice, is repressed and held out of sight and out of mind.
These 'logic of maximization'
explanations appeal to us precisely because they fit in so well
with capital's
self-portrayal. In strengthening capitalist common-sense in this way such
explanations sever attention from the complex host of powerful mythic associations
entailed in the devil story — and this to such an extent that it becomes virtually a political
act to stand back from the stream of conventionality from which such explanations draw
their strength and ask: "Why, if that's the case, don't these piece-rate workers simply tell
one another that they disapprove of anyone working harder than the rest? Why do they
bother with these weird stories? Why do they so poeticise the economy?" What, in other
words, lies in the stories themselves as statements about the working of the world?
This sort of critique of utilitarianism has been made many times (not least by Marx and
Engels in The German Ideology) and, doubtless, will need often to be remade. Its
importance here lies in its refering us to a quite different political world, one of opposi
tional cultural practice, in which poetic and imaginary figures such as the devil are not to
be seen as mere
window-dressing, false consciousness, or style covering over something
more basic, are not seen as instruments, but instead are in themselves sources of
experience as well — such that in my rendering of social life in the southern Cauca valley of
the early 1970s the figure of the devil freezes as in a monad the redemptive moment in lived

experience of labour-commodification at that time with its felt loss of job control,
humiliation, ursurpation of peasant plots and a pervasive sense of historical injustice,
intensification of labour, thinness of the working body, the cane described as the Great
God of the landlords, and so forth.
To effectively 'make' this interpretation the devil book relied on three sorts of delibe
ration (as regards the Cauca first, the historical,
valley): which is totally neglected by the
reviewers, despite its occupying by far the major part of the book, laying the foundations
for the appreciation of the devil as a capacious and capricious signifier of racial, class, and
to some extent, gender, conflict from the time of the Spanish conquest; second, the

description and contrast of work and production involved in the plantations, on one side,
— economic
and peasant plots, on the other briefly delineated summations of intensive

anthropological fieldwork spanning a twelve month cycle; and third the attempt to

interpret two
locally derived stories or 'folktales' (the baptism of money, and devil-pact

labour) as
neatly embodying the logic put forward by Marx (following Aristotle) of the
semiotic architecture and function of the commodity-form, an embodiment, however,
registering a 'take' on, or creative reaction to, the commodity-form (and not its mere

replication) such that the reifying properties of the commodity and hence its capacity for

rendering our social form as natural were denied and, to some extent, teased out.
As far as its author was concerned, the devil book was a novel endeavour, not least
because of the way it got to grips with the vexing base-superstructure, power-and
meaning, issues that plague Marxism as well as any other sort of worthwhile social

analysis, and did so by focusing on rituals (or alleged rituals) concerned with the

production of commodities, searching for what they had to 'say' to us about our habitual
ways of construing the naturalness of economic processes in general and of the commodi
fication of labour in particular.
Theemphasis, if not the whole point of this interpretation, is on what these stories had
to say to us, as opposed to what we have to say to them by way of, for instance, encapsu
if not dead of a well known —
lating them as so many nailed-down examples species
maintaining average production, deter 'rate busting', maintaining the mode of

reproduction of the mode of production (!), and so forth. In other words the emphasis was

decisively on ways of finding the anthropological monograph/essay equivalent to Bertolt

Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, of estranging the normal, making it disconcerting if not
and full of wonder — an effect which for Ernst Bloch included
astonishing distancing
experiences with a not-yet conscious Utopian meaning.
— for the
But not only this - and here I hold few illusions about being understood

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emphasis on what they have to say to us is also, so I believe, a powerful instance of what
was central to Walter Benjamin's Marxist philosophy of oppositional cultural practice,
namely that special sort of recuperation or "redemption" of meanings cremated by
Modern Times but which can in a moment of danger flash forth into memory as an image
such that if 'rescued' they can alter radically the way in which the present is seen as
actualized and endowed with revolutionary hope by the past. It was the task of Marxist
criticism, in Benjamin's opinion, to seize on these strategic possibilities, which in his later
work he called "dialectical images"
equated and
with the commodity, as fetish; e.g.
"Ambiguity is the figurative appearance of the dialectic, the law of the dialectic at a
standstill. This standstill is Utopia, and the dialectical image therefore a dream im'age. The

commodity clearly provides such an image; as fetish" (Benjamin 1973). In the devil book
the devil is just such an image.
While Benjamin reads (European) history, the anthropologist reads inter-culturally
(Europe and its Others), but the task of redemption is the same. Explanation and interpre
tation — of the meaning of the devil pact story, for instance — then becomes
something
crucially more and radically distinct from what is implied in efforts by foreigners, such as

Anthropologists, to place the story into a supposed webwork of strictly local functions.
The story by necessity is also for us — and it is the Anthropologist's task, in this continuing
era of imperialism, to read it as such.
There can be no other way because the Anthropologist is never confronted directly by
the Other but by the contact of self with Other. This means that the anthropological text is
in its very essence a text mediating difference — the shadows on the blank page formed by
the Other as illuminated by Western (middle class professional) light. As Robert Levy in
the introduction to his book Tahitians writes: "Consideration of Tahitian experience
a contrast or a comparison with the experience and modalities of other groups —
implies
primarily the western patients, college sophomores, and nursery school children on whom
so much observation rests
[and] this orientation to a large degree determines the questions
one asks and the observations one makes in exotic places ('Why are the Tahitians so

unaggressive?')". And he goes on to observe that while this makes for a complex situation,
it "seems to be a condition of much, and perhaps the most interesting, human knowledge".
Yet, with the exception of DaMatta, the Anthropologists reviewing the devil book in
Social Analysis are totally impervious to this issue, let alone what it might be, from a
Marxist point of view, what makes this (perhaps the most) interesting human knowledge.
Theirs is the monocular worldview of the colonial adminstrator espying reality right there
— —
pow! pitted in the navel of the Other, and not in the relational knowledge of self-Other.
In fact it is their very brand of Marxism which gives them this privileged Archimedean

point.
But from another Marxist point of view this question of what makes this knowledge so

interesting could be immediately referred to the problematic of fetishism as scored in the

devil book, namely the problematic of that epistemic movement by which 'internal
relations' (as Bertell Oilman uses the term (following A. N. Whitehead) in his book on
Marxist become 'external ones' — i.e. that movement
epistemology) by which something
that is intrinsically connected to another thing, and from which relation it gains its identity
and properties, is severed from that relation and perceived as a thing in itself, secure in its
selfhood. As with the table-turning that enters into the fetishized view of (and created by)
the commodity, according to Marx, so for the fetishized view of the Other — a thing in itself,
naked to our piercing gaze.
Contrary to this fetishizing on the Other as (our) object of study, the purpose as well as
the method the devil book is to deconstruct the internal relationship constituting
Otherness (as self-Otherness) so as to expose the crucial moves by which the self's notions
of the real, in capitalist culture, are rendered natural. More than this, though, there is the
activist political strain to go further than exposure, further or
than 'démystification',
'defetishization', for instance, so as to be exposed in turn, to the redemptive power that
such derealization of the self in the Other can entail — as in the finding of meaning for us, in
the tales of money being baptized and of pacts with the devil in the context of labour
commodification.
As such the tales displayed with hyper-coherent elegance the possibilities for such
- the author's to rework Evans-Pritchard's
redemptive listening yet despite attempts

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theoretical labours (prior to his 1937 book on Zande witchcraft) on the relations between

thought and rite, practical logic and cultural reason, the devil book left largely unstated,
and therefore unanswered, the absolutely essential issue as to the nature of the relation
between consciousness and culture implied in the meaning it attributed to these tales. And
while one may sympathise, given the enormity of the intellectual task hereby involved, and
hence be prepared to make allowances, this is nevertheless the Achilles heel of the book
because there is simply too much 'space' between the cultural meaning and the way people

consciously or semi-consciously think about the concrete events involved in everyday life
at any instant.
Nevertheless it needs pointing out that this 'space' contains the very problem facing
the development andblocking the expression of political consciousness. First, the
magnitude and complexity of the focus required here, namely that of engaging the

everyday with the use value/exchange value semiosis of the commodity, is surely beyond
most of us in any walk of life, and second there is a vast and mighty engine of ideology and

propaganda continuously at work to discourage, divert, and distort the flowering of self
conscious thought from such possibilities latent in the culture of commodities and their
fetishization. In short, the tales may be as good as you are going to overhear as regards
critical popular expressions of the inner logic of the commodity, no amount of fieldwork is

going to reveal more, and, as the devil book pronounces:

Between the art of the imagination and the art of politics intervenes a vast range
of practices, especially political organizing, and the conjuncture in which the
collective imagination ferments with the
appropriate social circumstance to

give rise to liberating practice is

notoriously rare. Yet only with this

conjuncture can the multiple ambiguities in the collective mentality acquire a

socially creative and clear expression, and the forces of repression are vigilant
and almost always too powerful. Until that conjuncture takes place, the politics

implied in folk magic works in several directions simultaneously (Taussig 1980:

230).

Dualism, The Natural Economy, Romanticism and Other Crimes

Listening also meant

contrasting (Webenan-Kantian) ideal types, the plantations as

large-scale capitalist
enterprises whose raison d'etre as modeled by Marx is capital
accumulation (M-C-M1), and on the other hand, peasant farmers whose existence in no

ways could be said to be modeled on capital accumulation but instead corresponded to

Marx's formula of C-M-C1. The social world never comes clean. Making sense by necessity

requires ideal-typing and contrasting, which in the case of the capitalist/peasant contrast
involved in the devil book was aptly caught by its epigraph, taken from Marx;
Thus the ancient conception in which man always appears (in however
narrowly national, religious or political a definition) as the aim of production,
seems very much more exalted than the modern world in which production is
the aim of man and wealth the aim of production.
It is this distinction that the Social Analysis reviewers have pounced upon as a wilful
and ignorant display of the cardinal sin of 'dualism', which I only wish they could explain
as it seems to me as redolent and as formative in Marx's epic account of capitalism as it is in
Weber's and Tawney's assessments of the moral impact and necessary preconditions for
capitalism, and in the plain and terrible fact of impoverished peasant farmers coexisting
(as in the southern Cauca valley) side by side with wage-labour based sugarcane
plantations. Surely there can be no denial that these are two very different modes of

cultivating crops and of making a living, most especially as regards the social relations of

production and of ecology? And just as surely the very warp and woof of the argument in
the devil book depends on the perception that this dualism consists of co-dependent

productive modes dialectially engaged in the encompassing process of capitalist

development?
As for what the devil book refers
peasant to as the
mode of production not having
"materialized anywhere in recorded
history", as Trouillot stridently denounces, it is
somewhat embarassing to have to point out that recorded history is far from being the only
source of authority anthropologists consider, just as the record itself only gains authority

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in the measure that it is seen as a cultural artefact. In any event, from Aristotle on, the
'record' is there, not least in the works cited above as well as in those of the 'substantivist'

wing of U.S. economic anthropology of the 1960s, drawing inspiration from Polanyi and

Chayanov.
With regards to the charge that the devil book presents an idealized or "Rousseauian"
(what did Rousseau really mean, anyway?) view of peasant life, it should be noted that the
following danger was highlighted in its opening pages (Taussig 1980: 6-7): confronted
with the occlusion of the subject and the reifying power-ploys of the scientism of the social
sciences:
it is all too easy to slip into other forms of idealism, and also into an uncritical

nostalgia for times past when human relations were not seen as object-relations
beholden to marketing strategies. Because the ethnography with which I am
dealing pertains largely to what are sometimes called precapitalist societies,
these dangers become pressing problems. For such social formations easily
seduce in precisely this problematic way the mind trained and honed by
capitalist institutions . . .
This is reinforced in a particular way later on where the notion of a Golden Age is carefully
presented as an idealization on the part of locals (ibid: 74,116-17, for example). And it is

precisely as such an idealization that the Golden Age is of crucial importance for the

understanding (ours as much as theirs) of the currents of feeling flowing into the meaning
of labour-commodification.

Contrary to (what I take to be) a "Rousseauian" view of the situation of the peasant
farmer in the early 1970s in the southern Cauca valley, the devil book depicts a grim state
of malnutrition, ecological degradation, and of parasitic infestation of the body, as well as
one of sufferings caused by the machinations of the large landowners and the State. The
fact of inequality between men and women, and the abandonment of women, in the sphere
of peasant production (not to mention elsewhere) is not only described, but is a central
axis of the attempt to provide an interpretation of local renderings of commoditization
(ibid: 119 ff.). As for what Chris Gregory (1986) takes to be his main point, namely that the
devil book rests on an unexamined notion of 'the natural economy', it should be noted that
crucial to the book's argument is the fact that some 70 percent of peasant households in
the region of study had so little land that their members sought wage work off the farm,
usually on the plantations (Taussig 1980: 83); hardly the usual notion of 'the natural

economy'. Indeed, if the book rests on anything it is that there is no natural anything,
economy or otherwise, and the use of the concept of 'natural' in connection with
Aristotle's formulation of economic process is meant to display the breathtaking reach of
the culturally elaborated biological metaphorization of the concepts of use value and

exchange value. Similarly, Gregory's argument that the book depends heavily on a naive
notion of 'the natural economy' in the 19th century seems also a wild misreading. As I
would have thought Chapter Three
abundantly made clear from a myriad of points of view
and angles of argumentation, the second
half of the 19th century, from the abolition of

slavery (in 1851) on, certainly seems to have been a period in which great concern was
as to the high degree of autarchy — as well as economic —
expressed political possessed by
blacks ensconsed in 'the dark woods' of the southern end of the Cauca valley. Moreover,
this autarchy was seen by the whites such as the Colombian geographer, Felipe Pérez, in
somewhat physiocratic or naturalizing terms. "Due to the astonishing fertility of the soil",
he wrote in 1862, "to eat one does not have to work, and therefore the people excuse
themselves from
serving others and this spirit of social equality that predominates

amongst the poor, drowns and tortures the aristocratic pretensions of the old mining

feudocracy" (in Taussig, 1980: 57).

It is to that "spirit of social equality", recorded so often during the second half of the
19th century and associated with fierce and wily resistance to pay rents (terrajes), to
undertake wage labour for landlords, and even at times to withold produce from sale on
local markets (according to State officials), that the devil-book is greatly beholden, as is its
companion volume, Esclavitud y libertad en el valle del río Cauca (Mina 1975) that I
wrote (together with Anna Rubbo who collaborated on one chapter) with the aim of

creating another sort of redemptive listening by folding back into the mid-20th century
this dramatic 19th century tale in a book destined for a readership of peasant farmers and

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rural wage workers in the southern Cauca valley, descendent from the free peasantry of the
post-Abolition period.
None of this seems to me to qualify for 'the natural economy'. In the first place, it
seems abundantly clear from the devil book, most dramatically in the letter of the brandy
distilling women to the landlords, that there was a considerable amount of production for
cash or markets. Second, as the landlords make clear in their letters quoted in the book, it
was the very connections with the national and international markets that made the Cauca
valley into a relative backwater for half a century. Third, the 'naturalness' of the peasant
livelihood was the subsistence or self-subsistence margin they cultivated so as to
withstand the pressures of landlords for wage labour-recruitment. Hence the 'natural

economy' turns out to be a highly politicised (national and international) economy.

Associated with this were the chihastic doctrines as expressed, for instance, in the
famous report by Ramon Mercado, in which concepts of the anti-Christ were fundamental
to the representation of the class and racist struggle to rid the free peasantry of its self
subsistent margin. Much, much, later, in the letters of peasant farmers to the government
in'the early 1970s, for instance, or in the conversations recorded with Tomás Zapata,
Maria Cruz Zappe, and Eusebio Cambindo (all dead now), also in the devil book, one
hears the same blending of Christian virtue with notions of what is natural and unnatural,
notions which conjugate with awesome precision the use value/exchange value
architecture of the commodity form as laid out by Marx.
In light of the charges of "Rousseauism", 'natural economy', and idealization of a
Golden Age, it is necessary to examine the more basic charge of 'Romanticism', that

magical hate-word at the elbow of every hard-headed Realist and Academic Bureaucrat

staffing the vigilante committees of the Social Sciences today, our day when everything
solid melts into air (Marx and Engels) and in despair at the passing of the referent the
Realist has little recourse but to denounce even the slightest stirring of the imaginary and

every will o' the wisp as 'Romanticism'.

The attempt to devalue revolutionary imagining as 'Romanticism' is of course part of
the nihilism and abstractionism of capitalism itself, just as the European Romantic
movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries was (as the devil book reiterates in its
discussion of William Blake
and of John Ruskin, for instance) a reaction to capitalism's
of the human — a and
devaluation being point made in local and religious idioms again
again by the people of concern in the devil book, and brought out with considerable pathos
by the argument of some of the Social Analysis reviewers that the devil-pact tale exists in
order to "maintain average productivity" or "to deter 'rate busting'
Centralto the functionalism of these reviewers is the idea of equality that Marx, in his

Critique of the Gotha Programme, classed as a bourgeois ideal which evaluated the worker

by only one (quantifiable) aspect of existence. As is belaboured in the devil book (Taussig
1980: 117-18), in a discussion based on the work of the late and much loved Chandra

Jayawardena dealing with equality in lower class communities in general, and on

Guyanese sugar plantations in the 1950s in particular, there is another and very different

concept of equality which Jayawardena defines as equality deriving from instrinsic human
or personal worth, rooted in what is seen as the human condition and capacity to feel,
suffer, and (lest in social science's grimness we forget) enjoy. While the devil book with its
'Romanticism' derives much of its force from this latter concept
of argumentation of

equality, as living fact

ideal, and as
and especially from the way it clashes with the
(bourgeois) notion
of equality embedded in marketing and maximizing logic, the equality
of the reviewers is just that — the reassertion of the market's form of value. It is indeed
striking how not one of the reviews can engage with the devil book by way of a discussion
of culture and ideology, of this absolutely central issue of the ideology of equality, for

example, let alone of its 'pitched' meanings in relation to the intensification of the

commodity form as a culturally constituting force. To the contrary, their task is that of

shepherding Marxism away from the sins of 'Romanticism' towards the pastures of

objectivist system building, abstraction, and correct and of

proper usage of 'modes
production'. Not for them, for instance, the sympathetic inquiries of Raymond Williams or
E. P. Thompson into the radicalism of the Romantic tradition, inquiries that were made

very much with an eye for the meanings available to British radicals in the 1950s face to
face with the Realism of (Stalinist) Marxism.

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Resistance and Terror

Which brings us to the ennobling topic of 'resistance', and to the accusation of the

(almost) wilful neglect of politics in the devil book as judged from the morally lofty
position of McEachern and Mayer (1986). I am extremely suspicious of those who take it

upon themselves to speak for the Other, nowhere more so than when it comes to the

currently fashionable theme of (other people's) resistance. I see the interest in this theme
as, by and largé, a substitute for resisting, let alone openly challenging, the hegemonic
forces for conformity that daily confront the writer in the West, and often a sickening
substitute at that, gaining vicarious thrills (images of Sandanista women with bandoliers

strapped across their chests and wielding machine guns . . .) from Others' conscious or
unconscious inabilty to conform with Progress. There is a profoundly serious question of

politics involved here: Why focus on the resistance of the poor and the powerless; why not
focus on the oppression by the rich and the powerful? There is a failure to 'theorize' what it
is about the
study (!) of Other's resistance that can be helpful to them, or to us. Most

especially there is the need to figure out the aesthetico-political issues involved in the

representation of terror so that it does not, through its depiction, stimulate more of the
same, let alone stimulate an unconscious identification with the forces of terror and

cruelty ostensibly opposed, as sadly seems to me to be the case with McEachern and

Mayer's vicious attack on the devil book for what they perceive to be its neglect of politics,
of (the now trendy study of) the State, and of State terror in the Department of Cauca

especially since the early 1970s as reported by Amnesty International. And where they do
admit to the book's concern with politics (as in the 19th century civil wars, the mid-20th

century Violencia, and so forth), then according to McEachern and Mayer it "fails to

integrate" such occurrences with the peasant mode of production. As with Franz Kafka's
vision of the State, you can'twin, and the way the State creates subservience is through just
such forms of terror where for every rule there is a counter-rule ("failure to integrate")
immersed in the miasma of magical rites dedicated to the stylistics of efficiency and high
moral purpose, most notably invoked where arguments are unstable and in need of an

authority-crutch; for instance, where McEachern and Mayer write "the work of Ennew,
Hirst, andTribe (1977) and Friedmann (1980) who have shown there can be no distinct

peasant economy, and on the other those including Foster-Carter (1978) and McEachern
(1982)who have demonstrated the inherent untenability of notions of articulation" (1986:
73); "and it has been a commonplace of industrial sociology since the Hawthorne study
"
that piece rate workers utilize such informal sanctions to deter 'rate busting' (ibid: 74);
"as Foster showed in Oldham, working class culture often draws on earlier beliefs" (idem) ;
in which case it becomes difficult for us — as for Kafka's K — to decide which bullying
authority we should follow because on the page previous McEachern and Mayer declaim
that "Given the history of such pacts with the devil spanning a millennium and a half, it is

impossible to accept Taussig's argument that they are 'intrinsic to the proletarianization of
the peasant' "; and perhaps the most beguiling example, concerning terror sown by the
armed forces in the Third World today, "While scholars disagree about the causes of the

widespread repression, there is no doubt that it is a world-wide phenomenon."

So much for the scholars! So much for the causes! I am tempted to add, especially
when faced with an uptight repressive text like this one so effortlessly reproducing the
terror it criticises.
In its striving for authority, this text secretes terror. And it seeks authority's blessing in
the culture of scientism, in the crushing language whereby social analysis is melted down
to the (supposed) proof-prowess of the hard sciences, as if social forms and their history
allowed of the same positivist experimentation as that conducted on rats in cages. (X has
shown that; Y has demonstrated that; It is a commonplace of industrial sociology
that . . .). Which raises once again the problem of'resistance'. What is it that zt»e should be

resisting? How do we ensure that our critique is not formed by what we oppose so as to
are the questions — and McEachern
become inseparable from it? These by the devil
raised
and Mayer inadvertently provide ample testimony as to why they are such politically and

intellectually important questions. Again on 'resistance' they write:

Resistance in the Cauca Valley does not only occur at the cultural level. The

kidnapping of the estate owners and the sabotage of machinery and equipment

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 in the mills and fields of the Cauca Valley are clear indications that struggle in
the Cauca Valley is not a rear-guard action which takes the form of resistance to
commodity fetishism on the part of peasants who inhabit a decaying pre
capitalist island surrounded by an encroaching capitalist sea but one waged by
a working class actively confronting capital (ibid: 74).
Are we meant to cheer? Is there a competition going on between peasants and

proletarians? Who said that resistance (if that is the word to use) to commodity fetishism
was a "rear-guard action"? How can sabotage and the estate owners' fear of kidnapping be
a "clear indication" of a "working class actively confronting capital"? Who said there were
— as if
different "levels" along which 'resistance' occurred (a) "levels" were anything more
than Kantian analytic devices, and (b) weren't flowing into one another such that any

activity (including a working class confronting capital) is of necessity culture-dependent?

Why this constant attempt first to reify and then to obliterate 'culture'? And surely it is a

major part of the devil book, as regards Cauca, that there isno 'working class' as

traditionally perceived in the Marxist texts. Instead there is at best a 'semi-proletarianized

peasantry' circulating between work on peasant farms and plantations? beAnd it would

my guess that it is precisely this "semi" quality that predisposed them towards the wooden
shoe tactics prevalent in the early 1970s. Moreover, the use of class labels is a sorry
substitute for analysis and an even sorrier substitute for thinking about the crucial

importance of regional culture and regional traditions of protest, of the meaning of

equality, and of racial identifications involved in the famous "confrontation with capital"
— which is why the chapters on history, especially that of the free peasantry in the 19th

century, are so important.

All of which strikes a cracked note against the charge that the book ignored politics
and State violence. The basis to the representation of history in the devil book is that

'power', meaning the race and class struggles for land, has precedence over 'economics',
that in the contemporary period military law and States of Emergency prevail, and that as

regards the particulars of peasant farming the book goes to some lengths to expose the
intervention of the (Colombian) State and USAID into peasants plots with a 'green
revolution'. (It is difficult to imagine a "more integrated" analysis than that.) As for
McEachern & Mayer citing Amnesty International, it seems to me an abuse of the
standards they demand for careful scholarship since the terror in Cauca since
the early
1970s invariably refers not to el norte del Cauca, parte plana (which is the sugarcane zone
of black day laborers and peasant farmers) but instead refers to the highlands of the central

cordillera, largely 'indian' areas of Toribioand Tierrandentro, stretching over into Huila
and culturally and politically remote from the sugar plantations. It was after the devil book
was published (let alone in press), with the rise of the M-19 guerrilla and President Turbay
Ayala, that State violence struck closer, but then it left the area of concern to the devil book
unscathed, being largely restricted to the cities such as Cali. Many more points in this vein
could be made — but that would only divert attention from the pettiness of the holier-than
thou academic bleating about terror emanating from the secure precincts of Adelaide.
As against the authoritarianism and theory of moral purpose on which that bleating is

based, grounded in the notion that it is the Anthropologist's or analyst's task to represent
the third world Other, it is the naggingly persistent task of the devil book to deconstruct
the scientism and notions of naturalness used to sustain such representations (while it is
the aim of its sequel, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man; A Study in Terror and

Healing (Taussig 1987) to deconstruct the of some

magic of the most salient represen
tations themselves). The effort here is not
simply to learn from third world peoples'
reactions to economic forms deriving from the first world, nor is it restricted to taking

seriously the view of the world and the social theorizing embedded in such reactions (as
Terry Turner claims (1986) to be amongst the devil book's main, but unachieved, aims).
These to me merely steps towards
seem the more encompassing and multi-layered task of

creating a juxtaposition of intercultural meanings such that the very feeling of the natural
and of the real, as we experience them in our social life, is perturbed and destabilized.

Assuredly learning from and taking seriously the views of the Other can also mean this, but

only if learning also means unlearning and if taking seriously includes laughing at oneself.
And this, so it seems to me, is definitely not on the agenda of most of what is called Anthro

pology, very much including its Marxist variants, wherein learning from the Other at best

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means slotting some particle of knowledge-information
into a long pre-established and

solidly constructed edifice of

knowledge-power production. Indeed, one wonders
whether it could be otherwise. And it is here, in the centre of this doubting, that commodity
fetishism is ushered forth, for here there is the possibility of dislodging the grip effected by
the real by means of (what Lukács called) its phantom objectivity, the 'naturalness' created
by the magic of commodities. It is here that the devil book aims not to delineate the Other
so much as destabilize the self inevitably constitutive in the Other.
To proceed otherwise, describing/analysing Otherness as an entity-in-itself, and by
whatever means — social and so forth —
trade, aesthetics, relations, production, dreams,
not only occludes the possibilities for redemptive listening but seems to me, no matter how
well intentioned (Liberal Marxist,
Progressive, Missionary, etc.) to amount to the same old
racism, imperialism, and
paternalism, that has constituted the West as a signifying entity
for several centuries. When, for example, I look over Terry Turner's intricately worked out
review (1986) I cannot but ask myself whether, for all its Marxism, it is not just the same
old imperialist attempt to strip bare the Other? I am forced into asking whether his
cumbersome analytic system of systems ever questions or is in the slightest way capable of
strategically dislodging the diffuse emotions, imagery, and concepts sustaining the
imperial discourse that is its brand of anthropologizing. Moreover, its very systematicity,
based upon and reproducing a notion of social life and of social forms as intricately
meshed interlocking cog-wheels of self-interest and false consciousness, with a place for

everything and everything in its place, seems ludicrously abstract and simple at one and
the same time, reducing —
history and society to somebody's computer program God's,
perhaps? (But, then, is His program IBM compatible?). And it is precisely at this point that
Turner's conceptualization of 'fetishism' is so decisive, equating it with that golden oldie of
'false consciousness', the quicksand on which the towering edifice of his infrastructured
system rests, and into which it slowly sinks, while the notion of fetishism at work in the
devil book not only scorns any notion of false (or of true) consciousness but depicts the

phantom objectivity of capitalist culture as something that operates through and

surrounds consciousness like magma.
For which there could be no better figure than the devil who, in the process of labour
commodification:

symbolizes the antithetical

processes of dissolution and decomposition, on the
one hand, and
growth, transformation, and reformulation of old elements into
new patterns, on the other. Thus in the devil we find the most paradoxical and

contradictory process, and it is this dialectic of destruction and production that

forms the basis for the association of the devil with agribusiness —
production
living death and florescent barrenness . . . Under these conditions prod
uction and destruction become interchangeable and interchanging terms

(Taussig 1980: 113).

In which case, wherein production and destruction become interchangeable and

interchanging terms, the search for 'law 'n order' not only misses the point, but in its

terrifying naïveté plays right into the hands of order's necessary disorder.
At stake here is (not the theory but) the practice of a theory of oppositional cultural
— not on the
practice part of the Other being studied, but of our own. Nothing more clearly
separates the aim of the devil book from those of its reviewers in Social Analysis than this.

The Rise and Fall of Marxist Anthropology

It came and went in the blink of an eye and what seemed like a brilliant future for
Marxist Anthropology in the mid-1970s now lies in a grave of dead-ended approaches
the epitaph 'Political — the
bearing Economy' sign which for Marx summed up all that was
critically in error in capitalist and capitalizing analysis, hence his sub-title to Capital, "A
Critique of Political Economy", a critique in no place made with greater irony nor with
greater power than with the chapter on the fetishism of commodities.
As against the continuous reproduction of capitalism's self-portrayal by means of
political economy, the concept of commodity fetishism creates a deep hermeneutic wound
in the otherwise bland scientism of the mainstream Marxist tradition after Marx. It riddles
the notion of 'the economy' with doubt, it creates a view of capitalist reality as one forever

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prone to oscillation between fetishism and reification, phantoms and phantom objectivity
— a diabolic in which and destruction become and
reality production interchangeable
interchanging terms. It furthermore directs us away from readings cast in the mould of
'false consciousness', towards a way of seeing the Utopian potential in the phantasmic aura
and qualities of commodities, perhaps nowhere more pronounced than when and where
pre-capitalist practices collide in this our modern world with capitalist ones to fertilize the
soil from which hope and the radical imagination draw their strength. And of all the
commodification processes it is surely that of human labour itself which, through the
poetic force of its fetishizing, is most prone to hold the natural at arm's length and even fill
it with wonder, as with the elusive figure of the devil, trickster and victim at one and the
same time, in whose shifting shades of light and dark the Faustian labour-capital relation
may be rendered. Fetishism alerts us to the radical potential in the old figures of the world's
torment as they come to recast the modern, and it encourages us to see and even empathise
with the repressed desires for a socialist world in the 'irrational' manifestations of
capitalism.
Turning its back
on this appeal to the backward-looking future-making force of
society's imagined worlds, what is generally thought of as Marxist Anthropology adopted
the reifying optic of positivist social science and plodded diligently into the swamp-world
of a different sort of make-believe — that of the —
unquestioned reality of Otherness which,
given the penchant of this type of Marxism for abstraction, economism, and totalizing
formulae, congealed into the polemics of 'modes of production' and the study of systems
such as 'the World System', becoming in effect, if not in fact, the social democrat wing of
the World Bank. Deeply complicit with that which it ostensibly set out to critique, deeply
dependent on and unable to disentangle itself from the capitalist categories of self

portrayal, insensitive to the incompleteness of history, unable, in a word, to grasp the

necessity for culture critique which would include its own procedures, such Marxism has
now become one of the truly boring pursuit of academia, a quality, no doubt, that will earn
it there a respected place even beyond tokenism.
Fetishism was one of those strange concepts of Marx which not only opened the doors
to the imaginary but allowed the cool night air of self-reflection to enter the otherwise
sealed caverns of what has become Marxism. Combined with Anthropology's (still to be
realised) potential to estrange custom, Marxism has not only the renewed possibility to
undertake Marx's self-prescribed task of waking the world from its dream about itself, but
of waking from its own dream world as well.

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