Breath of The Devils

The Breath of the Devils: Memories and Places of an Experience of Terror
Author(s): Gastón Gordillo

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 33-57
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the breathof the devils: memoriesand places
of an experience of terror
GASTON GORDILLO
Cornell University
In this article, I examine how an indigenous group of the Argentine Chaco re-
members experiences of exploitation and terror in terms of devil imageries
and how, in turn, these memories shape their current senses of place. My
analysis focuses on the Toba of the mid-Pilcomayo River and their memories
of work in a sugar plantation in northwestern Argentina. These narratives
hinge on different types of devils and cannibals that made the plantation a
place of estrangement, disease, death, and terror.In the 1990s, these memo-
ries informed the cultural construction of the bush of the Chaco as a place of
resilience, relative autonomy, and healing. [devil imagery, terror, place,
memory, Toba, Gran Chaco, Argentina]
Atthe breathof Godtheyaredestroyed;at the blastof hisangerthey perish.

-Job 4:9
Thealienationof the workerfromhis productmeansnotonly thathis laborbecomesan

object,assumesan externalexistence,butthatitexistsindependently,outsidehimself,
and aliento him,andthatit standsopposedto himas an autonomouspower.The lifethat
he has givento the objectsets itselfagainsthimas an alien and hostileforce.
-Karl Marx,1844
Thatplace is fullof devils.Plenty.A lot. It'scalledthe Tabacalplantation.

-Segundo, 1995 interview
On a clear day in the San Francisco Valley in northwest Argentina, it is impossi-

ble to disregard the imposing silhouette of the Andes rising to the west. Early in the
1900s, Europeanswho visited the large sugar plantations of the valley were impressed
by the view. In 1912, a Britishmissionary who had just arrivedat La Esperanzaplanta-
tion wrote: "The mountains with their ever-changing colours, the transition of light
from shade on the foliage, the glistening of the snow on the lofty peaks, are a source of
constant delight to the eyes and relief to the mind" (Hunt 1912:27). The Toba who
worked in the cane fields between the Turn of the Century and the late 1960s also
found the peaks impressive. Coming from the flat lowlands of the interiorof the west-
ern Chaco, they referred to the sugar plantations using the term kahogonaGai (the
mountains).' Their view of those ridges, however, had little in common with an aes-
thetic contemplation. Rather, the mountains were for most of them the spatial con-
densation of an experience of death and terror. Earlyin 1996, Ernesto, a man in his
late thirtieswho was in the cane fields as a boy, told me thatthere were plenty of diseases
at the sugar plantations. I asked him why. He looked at the ground as he answered:
American Ethnologist29(1 ):33-57. Copyright? 2002, American Anthropological Association.

34 american ethnologist
It'shardto describe.Itwas like a diseaseattacking.I don'tknowwhatdisease,but it

was tremendous.It'slike,it attackedsomebodyduringthe day, andthenthe following
day he was alreadyfinishedoff. Accordingto the pioGonaq[shamans],it'sthe devils
who live in the mountains.... There'splentyof devils in the mountains.When the
devils saw the people,they said:"Wheredo these people come from?"Andthenthey
said:"Let'sgo downthere."
This Toba group-also known as "western Toba," "iachilamolek Toba," or

"Toba-Pilaga"(Gordillo 1999; Mendoza 1998; Metraux 1937)-comprises a popula-
tion of about 1,500, living in a dozen hamlets located on the marshes formed by the
Pilcomayo River, near the border between Argentina and Paraguay.2 In the mid-
1990s, their experience of seasonal wage labor in "the mountains" was a crucial di-
mension of their social memory. Stories about kahogonaGa, the sugar plantations lo-
cated 300 kilometers to the west, surfaced repeatedly in the narratives of men and
women over fifty years old who had worked there until mechanization sharply re-
duced the demand for seasonal laborers in the late 1960s. Even young people who
had never been in the plantations had heard countless stories about them and could
give detailed descriptions of their parents' and grandparents' lives in the ingenio
(sugar plantation). As partof these different narratives,most Toba remembered the in-
genio as a dazzling, contradictory place of excess. This was excess of commodities,
which made them returnevery year in spite of harsh working conditions, and excess
of disease, death, and terror.The terrorof the plantation was epitomized in their belief
in several deadly beings with distinct features: first,the legions of devils or evil spirits
that lived in the mountains and were responsible for the high mortality rate among
workers and their children; second, the KiyaGaikpi,cannibal people who wandered
the San Francisco Valley in search of human flesh; and third, the Familiar,a devil that
inhabited the sugar-processing factory and requiredthe death of workers to reproduce
the wealth of the plantation administration. In this article, I examine the threads of
fear pervading this dimension of Toba memories of the plantations.3These memories
were produced through a dialectic connecting different historical moments and
places: first, as people articulated these narratives in the mid-1990s, almost thirty
years after the plantations had stopped being part of their direct experience; and sec-
ond, as they remembered the cane fields while in another place-their villages in the
bush of the Chaco. I will examine how these displacements inform memories and
senses of place and how, in this process of displacement and memory construction,
narrativesof devils and cannibals express experiences of exploitation, estrangement,
and political repression.
In anthropology, Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South
America (1980) and Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987) are perhaps
the best-known books on, respectively, devil imageries and terrorin their connection
with capitalist exploitation. These books, however, are thematically independent of
each other, and Taussig has not explicitly analyzed the connection between the two
texts and, in particular,between the devil and terror.4The question remains: How do
collective experiences of terror inform the production of devil imageries? In this arti-
cle, I explore this question by drawing on some of the debates opened by Taussig's
work and pursuing them furtherat different levels.
First,my analysis focuses on experiences of terrorhistorically differentfrom those
analyzed by Taussig (1987) regarding the rubber boom in the Putumayo. The terror
that permeates the Toba's memory of the cane fields is not associated with systematic
torture and mass murder. Rather, it is a fear of death embedded in appalling working
conditions, high mortality rates linked to rampant diseases, and political repression.
the breath of the devils 35
Yet, as I will show, the routine nature of this sustained fear does not make it less sharp
than other, more violent forms of terror. Ifterroris a form of domination based on hor-
ror and intense fear of death (Perdue 1989), the Toba experience of the sugar planta-
tions was indeed one of terror.This type of fear is part of an experience shared, in dif-
ferent ways, by groups of workers around the world (Marx 1977:389; Ong 1987; Pena
1997). And the inscription of fear in everyday labor practices has deep effects in the
production of subjectivities. In the words of Gavin Smith, fear is an experience that
can be "as emotionally pregnant as a circumcision, face-scarring, or other manifesta-
tions of 'cultural specificity' " (1989:220).
Second, in this article I examine how this particularexperience of terror, crystal-
lized in the fear of devils, relates to the social production of places and memories.
Several authors who have analyzed devil imageries implicitly make reference to their
spatial dimensions, pointing out that devils or evil spirits are localized in particular
sites, such as sugar plantations, mines, factory floors, sawmills, or roads (Crain 1991;
Gould 1990; Morote Best 1988; Nash 1993; Ong 1987; Taussig 1980). Places have a
similar, latent presence in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: The terroras-
sociated with the rubber boom unfolded in the lowlands of the Putumayo Riverwhile
the shamanic healing counteracting it, and gaining force from it, is grounded some-
where else-in the eastern slopes, valleys, and highlands of the Colombian Andes
(Taussig 1987). Although legitimately addressing other concerns, these analyses leave
unanswered an important question: How do these devil imageries and these experi-
ences of terror inform the production of places as meaningful localities? Doreen
Massey (1994) has rightly argued that places are produced through social relations
and practices in their connection to other places (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In
this article, I push this point furtherand argue that these connections are part of a dia-
lectic that, following Theodor Adorno (1973), is eminently negative: that is, a dialec-
tic that creates places in terms of what they are not in relation to other places. In this
case, I aim to show that these negative connections are produced not only through la-
bor migrations but also through social memory, in a process in which remembering
becomes an active force in the construction of the bush and the plantations as locali-
ties embedded in historical meanings. Thus, I will examine how the memory of fear,
illness, and death that most Toba project on the plantations is produced through its
contrastto their experience of the bush of the Chaco. At the end of this article, I will
analyze how this memory informs the production of the bush as a place of health,
healing, and resilience that is inhabited by devils that, unlike those of the plantations,
engage in relations of reciprocity with humans.
work near the mountains

The Toba of the Pilcomayo Riverwere first incorporated into the plantation econ-
omy of the San Francisco Valley at the end of the 19th century. This process was al-
most simultaneous with the final military assault of the Argentinean nation-state on
the Gran Chaco, a wide and mostly semiarid plain that until then had been the last in-
digenous stronghold in the country. This incorporation gradually transformed Toba
men and women into seasonal migrant laborers and also reconfigured their previous
practice as hunter-gatherersin their home territorieson the Pilcomayo River. The fact
that this region (mostly due to its poor soils and scarce rains) was not affected by an
agrarianexpansion enabled them to continue foraging, but under new constraints that
transformed the dynamics and meanings of their experience in the bush. These con-
straints included land encroachment by poor Criollo settlers, clashes with the Argen-
tinean army in 1917, and the foundation by British Anglicans of a mission station
among them in 1930, requested by the Toba with the aim of obtaining protection
from the army and the settlers (Gordillo 1996, 1999).
At the Turn of the Century labor migrations were sporadic, but in the following
decades most people moved back and forth between the Chaco and kahogonaGa as a
result of new forms of necessity: a process in which the acquisition of commodities
(firearms,clothing, utensils) and the reduced productivity of foraging created new de-
mands and dependencies. By the 1930s, labor migrations had become regular and
massive. Whereas in previous decades the western Toba had been recruited (through
contractors) by the Ledesma and La Esperanzaplantations, by the 1930s they worked
mostly in San Martin del Tabacal, a large ingenio located near the town of Oran
(province of Salta) (see Figure 1). These migrations encompassed between half and
three quarters of this group's total population, including men, women, and children,
and involved eight to ten months a year (fromMarchor Aprilto Novemberor December).
At Tabacal, the Toba became partof a heterogeneous mosaic of workers coming
from different regions and hierarchically segmented by the administrationalong eth-
nic lines. Thus, the administration assigned each group a different set of tasks and
paid them different wages according to what was considered their culturally specific
working skills and productivity. The top section of the hierarchy was formed by the
permanent factory workers (Criollos from northern Argentina) and the cane cutters:
Bolivians and Kolla peasants from the Argentinean highlands. The Chiriguano, slash-
and-burn horticulturistsfrom the Bolivian Chaco, were considered by the administra-
tion the best indigenous laborers and often worked in the fields on a permanent basis.
The hunting and gathering groups of the Chaco-Toba, Wichi, Chorote, Pilaga,
Tapiete, and Nivakl--were grouped together under the category Aborfgenes (or
Indios) and ranked lowest on the scale.5 They were considered unskilled seasonal la-
borers and assigned tasks complementary to cane cutting. Men usually cleared for-
ests, shoveled ditches, and chopped wood for the factory, and women were in charge
of weeding and planting cane. The Aborigenes received the lowest wages and suffered
Figure 1. Relative location of the Toba of the mid-Pilcomayo River

the worst working and living conditions. Unlike workers from other groups, they lived
in straw and bough huts with virtually no medical attention. As a partof these fields of
power, the forms of ethnicity that dominated social interactions in the cane fields
were produced by the incorporation of various groupings into a single political econ-
omy, in a process in which, to use Philippe Bourgois's apt expression, ethnicity was
"putto work" (1988; cf. Comaroffand Comaroff 1992: 50, 54).
When in the mid-1 990s the Toba remembered the living conditions prevailing at
the plantation, most of them were certainly aware of their negative effect on their
health.6 Yet a salient theme that comes out of their memories is the close association
between the diseases tearing through their bodies and the forces that lurked in the
mountains.
death and the devils of the mountains

Men and women alike agreed that countless devils inhabited the mountains
overlooking the cane fields. Invisible and like a silent breeze, they came down from
those ridges and spread deadly diseases among them. On the slopes circling the sugar
plantations, they sometimes acquired a visible shape by appearing as short and hairy
humanoids. Diego, a man in his sixties, remembered that in that part of the ingenio,
"therewas no peace, because the devils wandered, but like men." According to Nica-
cio, a shaman in his eighties, the diseases also came down from the mountains as a
hot and slow-moving fog, crawling down the slopes like a deadly breath: "Therewas
a plague, very bad, hot. At night, the high mountain looked like a hot fire. Some peo-
ple stink. The plague came down from the hill, like a smoke of the devils. Many peo-
ple died." Whenever I asked people whether there were devils in the plantations, I
was struck by their unanimous and expressive answers in the affirmative-epitomized
in exclamations of "ooh!"-and by the way they closely associated the abundance of
devils with the mountains. As Segundo, a man in his late seventies, said: "Ooh! There
were many devils. Plenty of devils. All the diseases. That's why the kids died; the
grown ups, women, girls, everybody." When I asked him why there were so many
devils, he replied, "We lived close to a mountain, that's why." The towering tropical
forests that covered the base of the mountains further enhanced this abundance of
devils. Those jungles were of a density and height unparalleled by the bush of the
Chaco, and for most Toba settings of thick, uninhabited woods are particularlysuited
for the evil and powerful spirits they call diablos in Spanish and payak in their lan-
guage.
Payak is an attribute of creatures or phenomena that cannot be explained or un-
derstood. As such, the term is often used as an adjective (cf. Metraux 1937:174). The
condition of payak is most graphically condensed in the evil spirits that Toba call by
the same name and that are seen as the cause of most diseases (either by their own in-
itiative or through the action of shamans). In fact, the Toba use the term payak most
often in this lattersense: as devil. The Toba incorporated the term diablo as translation
of payak through the influence of the Anglican missionaries who arrived in their lands
in 1930. Yet, most Toba did not adopt the Christian idea of "the devil" at face value,
as a singular and abstract entity. Rather, they reformulated this imagery in terms of
their previous cultural experience. In so doing-and as part of the colonization of lan-
guage associated with missionization (Fabian 1986; Rafael 1988)- the negative fea-
tures of the payak, now seen as diablos, were enhanced. The missionaries reinforced
this reformulation through a permanent preaching focused on "el diablo" as part of a
dualistic opposition between good and evil originally alien to this group. Before the
migrationsto the plantationsand the arrivalof the missionaries,the payak had probably a
more ambiguous character than today. Reformulated through contradictory experi-

ences of place, part of this ambivalence was reconstituted in the bush and acquired
new meanings, as I will show. Yet these ambiguous features were totally absent
among the payak of the plantations. Over there, the payak were simply alien and ut-
terly evil beings, diablos that caused unparalleled levels of death.
Inthe Toba's current memory, the diseases and death unleashed by the payak be-
came the embodiment of the social strainsembedded in the plantation, for, as argued
by Jean Comaroff in another context, "the signs of physical discord are simultaneously
the signifiers of an aberrant world" (1985:9). The death of children is a particularly
strong and painful theme in current memories. In 1996, Daniela, a woman in her late
fifties, remembered: "When people went to the ingenio, almost all the children died
there. And when they were back, all the women cried for the children." That children
are remembered as the most likely to fall victim to the dangers of the plantation con-
denses the view that this place threatened not just individual lives but also their social
reproduction. Many people argue that the migrations to Tabacal almost decimated
them as a group. I once asked Andres, a man in his fifties and today a farmer, if many
people went to the ingenio. He answered: "Ooh! Many! That'swhy all the people of
about my age were finished off at ingenio San Martin.That's why you see that we're
very few now. Forwhen we worked at the ingenio, when people returnedall the kids
died. They died. Boys, girls, grown-ups too."
Since the early 20th century, numerous reports have documented the extremely
high mortality rates among Aborigenes at the sugar plantations of the San Francisco
Valley. In 1917, an inspector from the Argentinean Department of Laborwrote: "The
indigenous mortality rate during these first weeks acquires dreadful proportions.
Families and tribes are wiped out. ... 'If it would be possible to investigate how many
leave their lives there -a missionary friend of mine wrote me-the numbers would
be horrifying' " (Niklison 1989:65, author's translation). In 1958, a member of the
staff at the mission station on the Pilcomayo River visited the Toba at Tabacal and
wrote about their appalling living conditions: "Itwas distressing to see the cramped
living quarters ... [and] the number of sick persons" (Kitchin 1958:26). Other mis-
sionaries reported on the very high death toll of little children. One of them described
the plantations as "the graveyard of babes" (Fox 1958:24-25; cf. Bradberry1958:58;
Tompkins 1958:90).7 In 1996, Ernestoremembered that people buried their dead in
the forests surrounding the cane fields, but that the following year those forests were
usually cleared in order to plant sugarcane. He added: "Atthe ingenio there must be
many skeletons in the middle of the cane fields." References to the bones of their peo-
ple scattered in the cane fields are also widespread in the social memory of the Wichi
(Segovia 1998:161, 163, 165) and are a graphic expression of the perception that the
Aborigenes were leaving in the plantation their most basic possession, their own bod-
ies, literally swallowed by vast fields of sugarcane.
The high mortalityrate and the permanent threat of the devils did not seem to de-
ter most of the Toba from going to the plantation every year. Many people remember
the disease and death at Tabacal as a harsh but unavoidable fact of life, and some told
me with a certain resignation that there was little that could be done about it. As Mar-
celino, a political leader in his late fifties, put it: "When we arrivedthere, I don't know
how many died. ... The ingenio was awful, but we went anyway. We didn't think
about dying. Ifsomebody died, he died."8The desire for commodities available in the
ingenio, enhanced by the Toba's growing inability to guarantee their social reproduc-
tion through hunting and gathering at home, seems to have been stronger than the
threat of death in the cane fields. Infact, people often emphasize in their accounts the
abundance of commodities at San Martindel Tabacal, somewhat obscuring the hor-

ror this place evokes in their memory, as if they were currently trying to compensate
for past experiences of suffering. The cyclical returnto the cane fields did not mean
that they did not try to counteract those dreadful conditions through manifold means.
Some remember that in order to protect their children, many adults did not take them
to the plantation, as long as relatives at home could look afterthem. In the plantation,
they also counted on the protective and healing power of their shamans, and some
people remember that at night they could hear the loud healing songs of several pio-
Gonaq treating sick people. However, they also argue that the shamans' power was
only partially effective against the payak. And the hospital of the ingenio, more often
than not, did not provide treatment to the Aborigenes. When conditions became un-
bearable, some people simply dropped work and left the plantation. At the end of
1995, Segundo, a man in his late seventies, remembered his own flight from the
deadly devils sweeping through his campsite:
Thatplace is fullof devils. Plenty.A lot. It'scalledthe Tabacalplantation.Manypeo-
ple died becausethe devils killedthe people, women, children.Thatday therewere
flies, black,small,coming out. Therewere plentyof them in the house, inside.One
persondied. And I fledto Oran.I didn'treturnto the ingenio.Idroppedthe ingenio.I
fled becauseit hadmanydevils.
The payak of the mountains were not the only dangers lurking at the plantation.
Many Toba remember that a particularlydangerous group of people inhabited the San
Francisco Valley. They were big and tall, had long beards, used pieces of cloth
wrapped around their heads, and were very wealthy. They were also cannibals.
the KiyaGaikpi: "they didn't eat beef"
According to many Toba, the KiyaGaikpi(the big eaters) were a group of people
who inhabited the surroundings of San Martin del Tabacal and whose most striking
feature was that they ate human flesh.9 The KiyaGaikpiare part of the direct experi-
ence of the generation of people who, in the mid-1990s, were approximately 65 years
and older. They saw the "big eaters" at the sugar plantations when they were young
and passed the memory of them to the next generations. Thus, even though many
people did not see them personally, they knew well who the KiyaGaikpfwere and in
the following decades were afraidof encounteringthem. Inthe 1990s, a few young peo-
ple told me that they were originally a bit skeptical about the existence of such peo-
ple, but they were nevertheless impressed by the stories they had heard. As Ernesto
put it: "Icouldn't believe it, but the old people saw them." In fact, Ernestowas the first
person who gave me a detailed account of the KiyaGaikpi. His father had seen them
and told him several stories about them. Inone of these accounts, a Toba man walking
in the cane fields came across one of their campsites. Ernestoexplained:
He was gettingcloserand a beardedmancame out. He was makinggesturesso that
he came, andthe Tobawas gettingcloser.When he saw the campsite,he saw all the
flesh hangingfromwires.Therewas the leg of a personhangingthere, insteadof the
leg of a cow. The man escaped rightaway and told the others:"There'sa groupof
beardedmenwiththe leg of a person!"Ooh!Thepeopledidn'tknowwhatto do. They
wantedto leave.Theforemantoldthemthatthey shouldn'tbe scared,thatthose peo-
ple were stayingoverthere.
Current memories about the origins, physical appearance, and wealth of the
KiyaGaikpi condense many aspects of the experience at the plantations as well as its
contradictions. According to most people, the KiyaGaikpi came from the place the
Toba feared the most: kahogonaGa, the mountains. Others argue that they also
dwelled in campsites located in the two other major plantations of the valley:
Ledesma and La Esperanza. Some old people have a vivid and detailed memory of
their looks. Nicacio described their beards and turbans, making vivid gestures: "They
have a mustache like this, all around here in the face [he put his hands all over his
face]. Their eyes are very small. They can't see. They have a big cloth on the head,
red, white. They don't use hat. They have chiripa [cloth wrapped around the waist],
no pants. Most ugly clothing." Other features of the KiyaGaikpi's appearance and
habits are a source of disagreement. Most people depict them as "white" or "very
white." Paradoxically enough, others claim that they were "black" or "mulatto."
Some people argue that the KiyaGaikpiwere workers at Ledesma and La Esperanza,
and that on several occasions they went to San Martin del Tabacal looking for work
and human flesh. Others, by contrast, deny that they were workers at all and argue
that when they approached the sugar plantations they just wanted to kill and eat peo-
ple. Many Toba agree that the reason why the KiyaGaikpiwere not workers was that
they were very rich, "full of money" (as many put it). Mariano, a man in his late fifties,
told me that the KiyaGaikpiwere fearless because of their wealth:
The KiyaGaikpilooked as if they were the ownersof everything.Theysay thatthey

live on the otherside, beyondthe big mountain.Theycame downwithtrucks,forthey
were many.Theyhavetrucks.They'reveryrich.Theyhaveeverything.Theysay that
they have airplanes.... They have money.Theyhave plentyof money.That'swhy
they'renotscared.
The commodification of social relations in the cane fields shaped Toba ideas
about "the big eaters" in many ways: not only in that many Toba considered them
"rich,"but also in the interpretationsof the ways they killed people. Nicacio told me
that the KiyaGaikpi used to leave small packages of money by the road, tied with a
string, as a "bait"to attract,capture, and devour people. Others remembered that they
used their money to buy their prey. They "purchased"human flesh either from other
workers or, as Gervacio-a man in his thirtieswith some political experience-put it,
"fromthe people who have money and contact with the authorities."Thus, the people
whose only commodity while at the plantations was their labor power believed they
were being bought and sold as a new type of commodity: as meat. The attitudes pro-
jected on these cannibals, in this regard,condense the very experience of commodifi-
cation associated with the plantation, where workers were reduced to consumable
and disposable objects. Moreover, the workers' flesh was for the KiyaGaikpinot only
a use-value but also a commodity used as a means of exchange. Segundo remem-
bered a particular story about a Toba man who did a changa (a day's work) for "the
big eaters." They paid him with a macabre commodity: the hand of a dead worker
"wrapped up in a piece of paper." This objectification of workers acquires further,
clearly gendered dimensions in another set of narratives common among men, in
which the KiyaGaikpicastrated their victims, put them inside a paddock, and fattened
them "like animals."
Unlike the devils from the mountains, the KiyaGaikpiwere human beings. On
some occasions, this enabled the Toba and the rest of the workers to defend them-
selves. Nicacio, for instance, told me that early in the century Toba men once shot
and killed two of these cannibals; however, they did it following orders from
Robustiano Patr6n Costas, the owner of the plantation.10In this regard, people are u-
nanimous: Patr6n Costas "didn't like" the KiyaGaikpiand "chased them away" from
San Martin del Tabacal when he discovered that they were "eating" his workers.
These accounts bring to light an importantaspect of the experience of the ingenio: the
image of protection associated with the administration and, in particular,with Patron
Costas. As a member of a prominent patrician family of Salta, Patr6n Costas led the
plantation on a personalized, face-to-face basis, cultivating the image of an accessi-
ble and sensitive boss. Most Toba were terrifiedof him, as I will show, but when they
remember the threat posed by the "big eaters," many are quick to note that, being
workers of Patr6nCostas, they counted on his protection.
In tension with the recollection of their fear of being the victims of the Kiya-
Gaikpi, some Toba argue that these men's eating preferences often prevented the
Aborigenes from being killed. According to several older men, the "big eaters"
thought the flesh of the Aborigenes had a "bad taste" and preferred instead to eat
Chiriguano, Bolivian, Kolla, and Criollo workers. This distinction is remarkable, for it
expresses one of the ways in which many Toba have internalized and resignified the
ethnic hierarchies created in San Martindel Tabacal. They project on the KiyaGaikpf
the despising attitudes toward the Aborigenes widespread in the plantation, yet, at the
same time, find elements of their aboriginality that played to their advantage. People
agree that what made the flesh of the Aborigenes less appealing to the KiyaGaikpfwas
that back in the Chaco they did not eat "nice things" but "bushfood." Condensing this
widespread perception, Bernardotold me: "They say they don't find the Toba's flesh
tasty. That's what the old people say, because the Aborigenes don't eat nice things,
they eat anything. ... They'd much ratherhave white people much better, for whites
have nice food and they find their flesh very nice." The tension between accounts like
this and the remembered fear of being devoured by the KiyaGaikpicaptures the par-
ticular dialectic of exclusion and inclusion that permeates current memories: on the
one hand, the sense that they were not valuable enough because of their status as
Aborigenes and, on the other hand, their feeling that their status as workers made
them susceptible to the dangers they perceived within the space of the plantation as a
whole. Given this immersion, and in spite of being Aborigenes, most Toba remember
that the fear of encountering the KiyaGaikpi greatly restricted their mobility in the
plantation: Men and women always had their children with them and avoided going
out of the campsite at night or alone.
Most Toba have clear difficulties classifying the KiyaGaikpi, a group of people
who certainly did not fit the ethnic landscape of the San Francisco Valley. To describe
them, they often rely on furtherdetails they collected from other people and their own
observations. Some remember that other workers and members of the administration
called them hindues (Hindus). Others told me that they did not like beef. As Segundo
put it: "They didn't eat beef. If one of them ate cow, he threw up. The nicest for them
was the flesh from people."
In 1912, La Esperanza,then the largestplantation of the San Francisco Valley and
owned by a British company, contracted over 100 Sikhs from India as part of an at-
tempt to find workers more "productive"than the Aborigenes from the Chaco.11The
presence of the Sikh workers at the plantation, described by an administrator as
"handsome fellows with wonderful curled beards"(Muir 1947:264), added a new ele-
ment to the kaleidoscope of cultural production emerging from the cane fields. In
1914, an inspector of the Argentinean Department of Labor described some of the
features of the Sikh workers that had caught the Toba's attention: they wandered in
groups from one ingenio to another, wore turbans and dirty clothing, saved much of
their earnings in the bank of the estate, and did not eat beef (Vidal 1914:15). Two
years after their arrival,there were only 50 or 60 Sikhs left in the area (Vidal 1914:15;
Zavalfa 1915:1 8). Many of them continued working in the plantations until India's
independence in 1947 (Sierrae Iglesias 1998:72-73). Other Sikhs stayed in the region
and settled in differenttowns of the valley (Lagos, personal communication 1997).
The meanings and practices that many Toba projected onto the KiyaGaikpiwhile
in the plantations point to some of the disturbing experiences that shaped their labor
practice. The fear of cannibalism does not seem to have played an important role in
Toba cultural practices priorto their migrationsto the plantations.12Probablyfostered
by the rumors of the Sikhs' distaste for beef and an antonymic association between
not eating beef and eating human flesh, the fear of the KiyaGaikpiseems to express a
particular aspect of the Toba experience in San Martindel Tabacal: the fear of losing
one of the few things they still owned while working there, their own bodies, perma-
nently consumed by exhausting work, mistreatment, disease, and death. In fact, the
region surrounding the sugar plantations has been haunted by stories of cannibalism
since at least the early 20th century.13This connection between capitalist exploitation
and cannibalism is far from being restricted to this area. Narrativesabout people be-
ing "consumed" or "eaten up" in estates, factories, or mines are common among
workers around the world (Gould 1990:29; Nash 1993:ix, 157; Pefa 1997:3; Stoler
1985:197-198).
In the Toba's social memory, there are some indirect but remarkableconnections
between the plantation administration and the cannibalism of the KiyaGaikpi. Even
though people argue that PatronCostas "chased the KiyaGaikpiaway," they attribute
to them features that put them remarkablyclose to their patr6n (boss):They were rich
and, according to many, they were "white" and "didn't work." The attribution of
whiteness to diabolical or dangerous creatures is widespread in Latin America
(Morote Best 1988:360-361; Nash 1993:164, 191-194) and in this case is particu-
larly remarkable because it implies "whitening" the skin color of the Sikhs (even
though, as we have seen, some people remembered them as dark skinned). As part of
the ethnic and class hierarchies experienced by the Toba in the plantation, most of
them see a direct continuum between wealth, whiteness, and not being a worker. In
spite of the contradictions in their current characterization, the KiyaGaikpi add a
fourth element to the list: to eat human flesh. With all its mediations and ambiguities,
the memory of these people as rich, white, and nonworkers points to the cannibalistic
aspect of capitalist exploitation: the consumption of the bodies of a social group by
the hunger for profitof another group.
Patron Costas himself was immersed in this blend between wealth, race, class,
and cannibalism. His "cannibalism" was concentrated in a particularly symbolic
place: the sugar-processing factory. It could not be otherwise, for as an administrator
of La Esperanza put it: "Thesugar mill is a huge, insatiable monster which must never
be allowed to remain for a moment without food for its jaws" (Muir1947:235).
the Familiar: "it comes out as gendarme or policia"

The factory was one of the places of the ingenio that the Toba and many other
workers feared the most because they saw it as the refuge of a diabolical creature
known as el Familiar(the Familiar,lit. "relative").Most Toba define the Familiaras a
payak entity, a diablo. Unlike the anonymous and generic payak of the mountains,
however, the Familiar was an individual with specific traits: a nonhuman, evil, and
powerful creature that lived in a confined space-the basement of the factory.14As
with the KiyaGaikpi, people portray the Familiar in heterogeneous ways, but most
agree that he appeared after midnight and acquired animal and human shapes. As
part of the same racialization of the KiyaGaikpias "white," many Toba say that when
the Familiarappeared as a human he usually turned into a white man. This whiteness
had a clear class component: this man was usually well dressed and educated. Tomas
described the Familiarto me as follows:
Therewas a Familiarin the factory.. .. Themanalwayscomes out, in the courtof the
factory.A big dog comes out, a big lion,all bichos [wildanimals]to lookafterthe fac-
tory.Sometimeshe comes out even in a suitand a tie, with shoes. Beautifulman. I've
seen him.There'sa changeof shift,and then people know it'sthe time when the Fa-
miliarcomes out. It'strue.He comes out attwo orthreeinthe morning.... Butpeople
arescaredof the man.He alwayslooksafterthe factory.... Herehe comes, and peo-
ple hid, silent.Tie,suit.He haseducation.
The fear of the Familiarand its association with the sugar industry is very old and
widespread in northern Argentina. The term Familiar has its historical roots in the
Europe of the Middle Ages. It was the name then given to the Devil (or to one of the
lesser demons under his command) that dwelled in the home of a witch (Godbeer
1992:162-168; Jones 1951:211-212).15 In Argentina, the Familiaremerged as an im-
portant component of the cultural landscape of the sugar plantations in the provinces
of Tucuman, Salta, and Jujuyand became part of the experience of the diverse popu-
lations providing the ingenios with their labor.16At Tabacal, most Toba apparently in-
corporated the fear of this diablo through their interaction with other workers, espe-
cially the Chiriguano. And after decades of labor migrations, the Familiarbecame as
embedded in their experience of the ingenio as the cane fields, the payak, or their la-
bor practices.
Most Toba remember the Familiaras a creature defined metonymically and sym-
biotically with Patr6nCostas and united with him through a "pact."17Unlike the devil
pacts analyzed by Taussig (1980), in this case it was not the workers but the patron
who made pacts with the devil, a notion also widespread in other regions of Latin
America (Edelman 1994:62; Gould 1990:30).18Thus, many Toba believed that Patr6n
Costas's power and wealth were closely intertwined with his relationship with the Fa-
miliar. They argue that the Familiarprovided him with riches, looked afterthe factory,
and made sure that the sugarcane fields were always green. As Emiliano put it: "That's
why Patr6n Costas had money. Not because of politics, but because he had a Famil-
iar."As part of their pact, the boss of Tabacal was believed to feed the Familiarwith
workers. In relation to the commodification and objectification of workers, some ar-
gue that he used his wealth to buy the complicity of "the government" vis-a-vis those
deaths and even the silence of the victims' relatives. Moreover, in an account similar
to some of the gendered narrativesabout the KiyaGaikpi,Patricio, a man in his sixties,
told me that Patr6n Costas used to capture men, castrate them, and make them gain
weight before handing them over to the Familiar.At the same time, the fact that many
people remember Patr6n Costas as a protective, paternalist figure permeates these
memories with unresolved contradictions that indicate the respect and fear projected
on him. Shaking me from the lethargy of a hot Chaco afternoon, Tomas once told me,
with a casual tone: "Patr6nCostas had a Familiar. Patr6n Costas was the nicest, very
nice man."
Many people contend that, apart from the workers it received from Patron
Costas, the Familiar also went out to kill people by himself, usually workers who
came from distant regions. This devil often made their deaths look accidental. On oc-
casions, the sign that he had killed somebody was that the siren of the factory went
off. The Toba's memory of the Familiar includes the same tension inscribed in the
memory of the KiyaGaikpi:a tension between feeling threatened by this devil because
they were workers and their simultaneous sense of being less likely to be killed be-
cause they were Aborigenes. Thus, exactly like in the case of the KiyaGaikpf, some
people told me that the Familiar"didn't like"the smell of the flesh of the Aborigenes
and, consequently, often preferredto kill and devour Criollo workers. This, however,
did not prevent most Toba from being terrifiedof the Familiar. On some occasions,
the administration sent parties of about a dozen Toba men to work in the interior of
the factory. These men once saw the Familiarwith Patr6n Costas. Enrique,a man in
his late fifties, told me about this encounter in detail, recalling the terrorthey felt at the
sight of the Familiarturned into a large white man with suit and tie:
We once went underneaththe factory.... Therewas a jefe (foreman)who was with
us and he said:"Ifa fatpersoncomes out,a personsortof red,nobodyhasto talk.You
don't have to talk.Otherwise,somethingwill happen."... [Theforemansaid:]"Pa-
tr6nCostasis coming."And we all startedsweeping.We all had brooms.... There
they came, the engineer,Patr6nCostas,and the fat man. [Patr6nCostassaid]"Good
morning.These are my braveand strongpeople [mi gente guapa]."And he gave a
cigaretteto each of us and also matches.Andthe fatmanwas rightbeside him,with a
blacksuit,blacktie. He didn'ttalk,butwe knewbecausethe foremanhadexplained
to us.... ThenPatr6nCostaswentto anothercorridorwiththatman.... Then,one of
us said:"Let'sgo! Let'sgo! Let'sgo!"We all ran.We went upstairs.We alltalkedabout
how scaredwe were:"Ithinkthatwas the Familiar,the one who was with us! That's
it!"... The old Naid6 said: "I'llnevergo down thereagain. I'mreallyscared."We
didn'tknow him, butthe jefe told us thatwe shouldn'ttalkto himor get close to him
because he was the Familiar.
The memory of this encounter points to the fact that the fear of the Familiarwas
often encouraged by members of the plantation administration.Many people told me
that Criollo foremen often warned them "to be careful" with the Familiarand not to
wander at night close to the factory. Inthis regard,the construction of a climate of ter-
ror around Patr6n Costas contributed to reinforcing a submission to his authority and
to maintaining the factory free from intruders.Yet, it would be misleading to reduce
the Familiarto the product of a utilitarian strategy of social control designed by the
plantation administration, as Rosenzvaig (1986:249) has claimed. The manipulation
of the figure of the Familiarby members of the administrationseems to be an attempt
to use for their own convenience an old and widespread imagerycreated and re-created
by the workers themselves. In addition, these ideological attempts at social control
were not necessarily successful. Because the figure of the Familiarsaturated the fac-
tory with imageries of evil on some occasions it catalyzed forms of critique and dis-
content, something that emerges in Criollo narratives.Thus, Criollo workers with ex-
perience in unions and collective struggles often tell stories of men who fought the
Familiar and even killed him (Isla and Taylor 1995:318; Rosenberg 1936:135,
136-137; Vessuri 1971:62-63). Conversely, the Toba today remember the Familiarin
a way that seems integral to their memories of political powerlessness in the ingenio.
Due, to a great extent, to the ethnic segmentation of the labor force, the Aborigenes
usually formed the less politicized segment of workers and rarelyjoined the strikes led
by unionized Criollo workers. Along these lines, most Toba remember the Familiaras
a devil so powerful that any type of resistance against him was futile. When I asked
them whether it was possible "to defend yourself" from the Familiar, some people
looked at me with a certain wonder at the extravagance of my question, before an-
swering: "No, it's not possible."
As he is remembered now, the Familiarsomehow condensed the almighty and
paralyzing power of the plantation, a power in which nonhuman and human actors
were closely intertwined. In this regard,the memory of the Familiaris directly associ-
ated with the presence of repressive forces. The Toba's fear of men in uniform in
Tabacal was connected to the memory of their previous experience of terrorwith the
Argentinean army, which in 1917 had launched a bloody attack on them in their
lands. In the 1920s and 1930s, several incidents in San Martindel Tabacal also turned
the plantation into a place subjected to the violence of the military. Old people re-
member that in those days the administrationthreatened "to kill all the Toba" on vari-
ous occasions, due to violent assaults on foremen by Toba men working at the planta-
tions for the first time and not used to taking abuses. In the following decades, this
type of experience of fear vis-a-vis men in uniform continued. At San Martindel Taba-
cal, the everyday surveillance and control of workers were the job of various groups
of foremen and the plantation's private police force (Nelli 1988:41, 42). This force
was supported by the squadron of gendarmeria (militarypolice in charge of border ar-
eas) deployed in Oran, which regularlycurbed unrest in the plantation. In current ac-
counts, these various forces are closely intertwined with the Familiar. Unlike the Cri-
ollo workers, most Toba make no explicit connection between the victims of the
Familiarand their level of political activism.19Yet, most of them associate this diablo
with forms of repression at numerous levels. Patricio told me that when the Familiar
came out of the factory, he usually turned "into a gendarme or a policia" (policeman).
He added: "Then, when he walks inside the factory nobody recognizes him.... The
Familiargoes through the streets with a pickup truck, in Oran." The Familiar, in this
regard, became the very embodiment of the armed institutions of the state controlling
and patrolling the area, to the point that in people's accounts the lines separating the
two are often blurred. Mariano remembered: "We were afraidof the Familiar.And we
were afraid of gendarmeria as well." I asked him why. "Well, gendarmeria was there
because of the people who went on strike.That'swhat we were afraidof."
These combined memories of the Familiar,gendarmes, and policias gain a par-
ticular meaning given the recent history of state terrorismin Argentina. In fact, some
of the forms of repression the armed forces unleashed in the late 1970s in the whole
country had already been implemented for decades in the sugar plantations of north-
west Argentina (Nelli 1988:41; cf. Rosenzvaig 1986:250-255, 1995:35; Rutledge
1975). In the 1970s, this amalgamation between state and capitalist terrorism in the
San Francisco Valley reached its peak in the el apagon (black out) of the ingenio
Ledesma the night of July 24, 1976, four months after the onset of the military dicta-
torship. That night, a combined force of soldiers and plantation policemen acting un-
der total darkness kidnapped 300 workers from their homes (Nelli 1988:117;
Rosenzvaig 1995:62). The Toba did not experience this last wave of terror. By that
time, they had stopped migrating to the cane fields and were in their lands in the
Chaco. And because their home region was relatively marginal in terms of previous
political activism, they were not directly affected by the kidnappings, torture, and
murderthen common in others parts of Argentina. Yet, the way some people remem-
bered the Familiar in the mid-i 990s combined their own previous experiences of re-
pression and terror in San Martin del Tabacal with what they have heard about the
violence unleashed by the military in the second half of the 1970s (throughthe media
and their interaction with politicians). Thus, the terminology some people use to refer
to the Familiaris similar to that which became customary in Argentina to referto state
terrorism. In 1996, Gervacio, who went to Tabacal as a boy, told me about people
who "disappeared"because of the Familiar;also he remembered rumors that attrib-
uted people's deaths to "electric shocks"-terms that, in Argentina, automatically
bring to mind images of torture and state terror. Most people also remember that
when the Familiar came out and killed people the lights of the factory went off, a
memory that may indicate that "black outs" to kidnap workers were also undertaken
at the time they were working in Tabacal.
At this point, it is important to examine how these memories of devils, military
forces, cannibals, and PatronCostas contributeto configuring the space of the ingenio.
estrangement, fetishism, and the places of terror

The different figures just analyzed are interconnected in the Toba's social mem-
ory as a complex ensemble of images of death and fear. But this amalgamation defies
a direct association between terror and the actions of the plantation administration.
This situation is particularly clear in the case of the payak of the mountains: These
devils were faceless, anonymous, and usually invisible forces that in the eyes of most
Toba were responsible for most of the deaths in the cane fields-but which were un-
connected to the power structure of the plantation. The KiyaGaikpi,for their part,
stand in a contradictory place: They had no direct link with the administration, but
were metonymically associated with ethnic and class features of administrators.In
other words, because the "big eaters"were linked to wealth and whiteness, their can-
nibalism indirectly pointed to the class subject position of the patrones of the ingenio.
In the case of the Familiar, his connection with the administrationwas clear and un-
ambiguous: This diablo was the very embodiment of Patr6n Costas and his armed
forces. Despite the differences among them, there is a common thread articulating
these devils and cannibals: they are strongly localized; they exist only in San Martin
del Tabacal and its immediate surroundings. As a result, they mark this particular
place with dense images of terror, danger, and estrangement. Simultaneously, these
figures are inscribed unevenly in the plantation;they produce a spatial differentiation
in which some places absorb with greaterforce the terror latent in their surroundings.
These places are the factory, the core symbol of the forces of production unleashed by
the ingenio; and the mountains, a part of the landscape seemingly unrelated to those
forces, but that, being alien to the Toba's earlier experiences of place, somehow cap-
tured the estrangement associated with wage labor.
In this regard, many of the meanings of the mountain devils and the Familiar
were deeply shaped by a localized experience of alienation: the Toba's experience of
feeling separated from their labor and its products while being in the cane fields.20
This estrangement was more than the result of economic exploitation: Italso was pro-
duced by the inclusion of Toba men and women within the most undervalued ethnic
segment of the labor force and by their immersion within an overall climate of repres-
sion and political terror. These experiences made the plantation a place from which
most people felt estranged, whose rules and dynamics they did not control. This es-
trangement, coalescing in devils and cannibals, captures one of the features that Karl
Marx associated with alienation: the fact that the worker feels that the product of his
labor "sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force" (1964:123).
Prone to creating "alien and hostile forces," this estrangement is central in the
fetishization of social relations produced by devil imageries. Certainly, importantas-
pects of the fetishism associated with the payak were partof the cultural habitus of the
Toba previous to their experience at the plantations: a set of subjective dispositions
amenable to explaining disease and death by the action of forces beyond human con-
trol. Thus, in their first labor migrationsthe figure of the payak provided them with the
symbol through which they tried to understand the diseases decimating them in the
cane fields. The experience of missionization at home charged the payak with further
negative meanings, turningthem into diablos. And their interactionwith other workers
expanded these meanings to include a diabolical creature new in their experience:
the Familiar. But once produced and reproduced in the particularspace of the planta-
tion, these imageries were deeply intertwined with the type of fetishism inscribed in
the capitalist production of commodities: the objectification of the social relation be-
tween labor and capital in entities with lives of their own, detached from the social
conditions of their production.
Michael Taussig was among the first to address the connection between com-
modity fetishism and devil imageries. He has been rightly criticized for relying on du-
alistic oppositions between types of "exchange systems," "modes of production," and
"forms of fetishism" that oversimplify his historical and ethnographic material (see
Gregory 1986:67; Platt 1983:64; Roseberry 1989:222; Trouillot 1986:86-87; Turner
1986:105). Yet, Taussig's argument that devil imageries merge commodity fetishism
with indigenous forms of fetishism (or in his phrase, "precapitalist"fetishism) remains
an insightful contribution that illuminates some of the features of the devils examined
above.
Among the Toba, this combined fetishization became a crucial component of the
cultural construction of the cane fields. Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari
(1993:189) have rightly argued that economist readings of commodity fetishism as
"false consciousness" obscure the fact that this fetishism is an active force in the pro-
duction of social and material conditions. For the Toba, the fetishization crystallized
in devil imageries was part of the very matrix in which the plantation was produced
and reproduced as a place. In this regard, it would be simplistic to reduce the payak,
the KiyaGaikpi,and the Familiarto veiled, distorted expressions of "real"social con-
ditions. The fantastic monstrosity of these diablos and cannibals is indeed inseparable
from the very real, fabulous, and monstrous forms of wealth (and estrangement from
it) created by capitalism, a merging that Marx himself identified when he referredto
the "phantom-like"or "ghostly"objectivity of the commodity (1977:128). As Thomas
Keenan wrote in his analysis of commodity fetishism: "Aberrant,deviant, the mon-
strous is the form of appearance of wealth, the way it signifies itself... ghosts and
monsters are the (figurative) names of the commodity" (1993:157, 182). Current
memories of San Martindel Tabacal are repeatedly informed by this semantic link be-
tween devils and commodities. When I was in the field, I was often struck by the ease
with which people were able to shift from one topic to the other. Marcelino, for in-
stance, was telling me about the Familiarwhen he suddenly made a comment on how
"nice" it was when they worked at the ingenio:
Whenyou saw a blackdog you hadto escape, becauseit was the Familiar... When
he wantedto, he was goingto killpeople. Ooh! Atthattimetherewas a lot of workin
the ingenio.Butthe workwas nice. Itwasn'tmuch.Butwhen you worked,you earned
clothes, a lot of clothes, bicycles, recordplayersfor music, radio,shotgun,donkeys,
horses.
The fetishism of the commodity is indeed part of the same thread creating the fet-
ishism of the devil. It was much later that I realized that in accounts like this, rather
than easily "shifting topics" many people were just talking about different aspects of
the same unfolding: the mystery; lack of closure; and the phantasmagoric, terrifying,
and, at the same time, dazzling forms of magic embedded in capitalist forms of pro-
duction. Given the connection between devils and commodities, it is important here
to reconsider Terence Turner's argument (1986:111) that devil imageries represent
power ratherthan capitalism. Power is certainly a crucial dimension giving shape to
these imageries,yet this power should be examined in connection with specific historical
and spatial conditions such as those examined above. In this regard,the power of the
diablos at San Martindel Tabacal is not just power in the abstract. This power is in-
scribed in a very particular place that is the product of particular historical forces.
Hence, the deadly force of these devils is intertwined with a specific type of power:
that of a place ruled by capitalist relations of production, as they coalesced in San
Martin del Tabacal. In the 1990s, this spatial inscription informed not only the Toba's
memories of estrangement in the ingenio but also their senses of place in their lands
near the Pilcomayo River.
"we're not going to die"

In the mid-1 990s, most Toba based their livelihood in the bush surroundingtheir
villages: the thorny and thick forest, usually five to ten meters high, which dominates
the flat and semiarid landscape of the western Chaco. Most households combined
fishing, gathering wild fruits and honey, hunting, and flood horticulture near the Pil-
comayo with various forms of petty commodity production (craftsmanship, sale of
produce, commercial hunting) and jobs and pensions in state agencies. Since the
mechanization of the sugar plantations in the late 1960s, many men and women work
as seasonal harvesters in cotton and bean farms located hundreds of kilometers away.
But these new labor migrations absorb far fewer people than in the past and only for
one or two months. When people in the Toba villages remember San Martindel Taba-
cal, the contrast between the cane fields and their lands shapes their senses of locality
at many levels, and it does so negatively-by highlighting what one place is not in re-
lation to the other. Fordecades, the experience of illness and death at the ingenio was
enhanced by the cyclical returnto a place relatively free from them, a place of their
own organized along social relations and experiences very differentfrom those domi-
nating "the mountains." As partof this annually re-created contrast, the bush emerged
as a place of health. In 1995, explicitly contrasting the illnesses of the plantation with
the health in the bush, Diego told me:
Inthe ingeniotherewere all typesof diseases.Youdidn'tlackdisease:coughing,fe-
ver, smallpox.... That'swhy manykidsdied, manygrownupstoo.... Thediseases
came fromthe mountain.... Here [in the bush],there'salmostno disease. There's
some, but aftera littlewhile it goes away.... Inthe ingenio,therewere tons of dis-
eases. Theydidn'tgo away.Hereinthe bush,the diseasesdon'tshowup. Itseemsthat
over here,we don'thavewhatthey haveoverthere.
Similarly, in 1996 Mariano remembered that one of the many times he went to
San Martindel Tabacal his two little children got very ill and almost died. As a result,
from then on he decided to leave them in his village in Sombrero Negro. He added:
"The next time I returnedto the ingenio, I didn't take my kids with me ... because in
Sombrero Negro there was no disease. It was very nice." Yet the bush became more
than a place defined by the relative absence of the diseases decimating them in the
cane fields; it also became a place of healing: a place where they were able to recon-
stitute a physical and social body torn by experiences of illness, death, and terror.As a
furtherconfirmation of the negative spatiality of the dialectic shaping the bush and the
plantation, partof this healing was based on the powers of the payak of the bush. Even
though the payak localized in Toba lands also are called diablos and can be poten-
tially dangerous, they engage in forms of reciprocity with humans unthinkable among
the payak of the plantations. They provide shamans with their healing power and
regularly help foragers find bush food (fish, wild fruits, honey, and game meat). The
contrast between these payak of the bush and those of San Martindel Tabacal is so
sharp that, when I asked people to compare the presence of payak in the two places,
most of them often argued that in the bush there are actually no devils. Luisa, a
woman in her late twenties who was never in the ingenio, told me what she had heard
about Tabacal from her mother. I asked her whether there were payak there, and she
replied:
Luisa:Oh yes, thereweretonsof payakatthe ingenio,becausethe mountainsarevery
close. There,it was much moredangerousthan here in this zone. There[thepayak]
came out duringthe day, duringthe night.Itwas moredangerousthan here. That's
whatthey say.
GastonGordillo:Aroundhere,aretherepayaklikethose?
L: No. There'salmost nothinghere. There'reno storiesof somebody seeing the
payakon the road.Butoverthere,thereare.
This perceived contrast between the ingenio and the bush points to the different
productive practices inscribed in these places. The most direct expression of the for-
aging practices carried out in the bush, as well as the collective relations that organize
them, is bush food. Most people make a strong association between this type of food
and health and physical strength. Hence, the production and consumption of bush
food, related in many ways to the reciprocity of the payak, is a furthercomponent of
the experience of the bush as a place of social healing. Contrasting their physical
weakness at San Martindel Tabacal with the way they felt at home and the food they
ate there, Diego remembered: "Aroundthis time of the year [October], people were
already feeling flabby. They wanted to come back home. They were thinking that they
wanted to eat fish and honey." Another factor contributing to the current valorization
of bush food is that this food is always available to those in need and, as a result, is
readily shared among kin and neighbors through reciprocity networks. These values
embedded in wild fruitsor honey are nourished by their contrast not only to the com-
modified packaged food sold in local stores but also the memories of the commodifi-
cation of their life in the cane fields, which acquired dreadful proportions in the ac-
tions of the KiyaGaikpiand the Familiar.Due to these qualities, bush food epitomizes
the resilience most Toba associate with the bush as a place that has provided them
with relative shelter from exploitation and death. In 1996, Pablo told me with a par-
ticularly intense tone:
SometimesI hearthatthey'regoing to makea warto killthose who have nothing,so
thatthe Aborigenesdie, dyingof hunger.SometimesI say:We'reAborigenes.We're
not goingto die becausewe have the food fromthe bush. I'mpoor,but I'mnot going
to die becauseI havesomethingto forage,to fish,to gatherhoney ... Of coursewe're
not goingto die! We'renotgoingto die.
Life in the bush is far from being free from hardships, and many people associate
their lands with poverty and unfulfilled necessities created by their dependence on
the cash economy (Gordillo 2002). Toba everyday practices are also constrained by
local forms of domination, both by Criollo merchants and indigenous political leaders
who are acquiring increasing power and wealth through government jobs (Gordillo
1999). Yet, the memory of past experiences of death simultaneously projects on the
bush, as in Pablo's account, strong meanings of resilience from suffering and from at-
tempts to murder "those who have nothing":the Aborigenes. People over 50 who had
a first-hand experience of the plantation articulate these meanings more openly and
clearly than younger people, who have never been there. Nonetheless, among new
generations the memories passed on to them by their parents and grandparents also
inform their senses of locality. When young men and women migrate for work in dis-
tant farms, they often compare these places with what they have heard about "the
mountains." And the threat posed by the anonymous payak that inhabit these
farms-dangerous and alien but less deadly than those of the ingenio-also charge
these places with threads of estrangement and fear. During their foraging trips in the
bush, young people's tacit interaction with the devils that facilitate the access to bush
food also is part of the set of contrasts binding their lands, the farms, and the social
memory of the payak in kahogonaGa. In differentways, the stories that older men and
women regularly tell about their suffering at the foot of the Andes become, for the
younger people listening to them, a way of discovering a new meaning of "home."
conclusions
Afterthe significant rise in the interest in devil imageries that followed the publi-
cation of Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, several an-
thropologists rightly have emphasized that it is importantto avoid creating an abstract
model of these imageries (as done, in some ways, by Taussig) and to situate them in
the historical and cultural circumstances of their production (Nash 1993:xxxvii;
Nugent 1996:281; Roseberry 1989:221). In this article, I have tried to furtherexpand
this point by situating narrativeson devils not only in specific experiences of labor but
also in particularplaces: places remembered and places in which the act of remem-
bering is localized. Moreover, I have tried to show how these spatialized memories
are active forces in the production of places as meaningful locales. The Toba's current
memories of the payak, the KiyaGaikpi,and the Familiarare crucial in delimiting not
only the plantations as a place of death, disease, and terrorbut also some of the mean-
ings currently inscribed in the bush. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre
wrote: "Itis only in space that ... conflicts come effectively into play, and in so doing
they become contradictions of space" (1991:365). Formany Toba, it is in places such
as San Martindel Tabacal and the bush, and in the tensions connecting them, that the
contradiction between exploitation and relative autonomy that pervades their histori-
cal experience comes effectively into play in their subjectivity and social memory.
What do these contradictions inscribed in space, and their articulation in the fear
of devils, say about the forms of consciousness produced by experiences of social suf-
fering and terror?Taussig (1980:18, 129, 132) has argued that in several partsof South
America devil imageries imply a critique of capitalism because they attributeunnatu-
ral, evil connotations to capitalist forms of accumulation of wealth. Several authors
have contested this position and shown that in many contexts the meanings of the
devil are much more complex and ambiguous than Taussig concedes (Da Matta
1986:62-63; Edelman 1994:78; Nash 1993:xxxvii; Turner1986:110-111). In this ar-
ticle, I have tried to show that the Toba's memory of the plantation is indeed perme-
ated by threads of ambiguity, produced by the oscillation between images of illness
and abundance, devils and commodities, a terrifyingFamiliarand a nice patron. Yet,
this oscillation does not mean that the recollection of devils and terrordoes not trigger
critical meanings. In fact, memories of death and fear tend to dissipate ambiguity
through the evocation of unambiguous images of suffering. Furthermore,the inscrip-
tion of these memories in places indicates something important about the ways in
which experiences of terror inform consciousness. Jean and John Comaroff rightly
have argued that social consciousness is not the opposite of unconsciousness; rather,
it is a chain of forms of perception combining "the seen and the unseen, the sub-
merged and the apprehended, the unrecognized and the cognized" (1991:29).
Among the Toba of the Pilcomayo, it is in the contrast between the terrorof the cane
fields and the resilience of the bush that many people find an arena from which to
articulate an inchoate critical awareness about their past experiences in San Martin
del Tabacal. In other words, paraphrasingHenri Lefebvre, it is especially in contradic-

tions in space that forms of consciousness come effectively into play in their current
everyday practices. This critical apprehension hovering between the explicit and the
implicit emerges in multiple domains: the valorization of the bush as a place of health
and healing defined in tension with the death permeating the cane fields, the repro-
duction of forms of reciprocity alternativeto the objectifying commoditization of their
labor and bodies, or the creation of markersof ethnicity such as bush food that coun-
teract the devaluation of their aboriginality in the ingenio. The saturation of the cane
fields with devils and cannibals is a crucial component of this negative dialectic in-
scribed in space. This does not mean that through these imageries people express a
critique of "capitalism" in the abstract. But the memories of the scores of devils de-
scending from the mountains to slay their children, of the dangers reducing their bod-
ies to consumable and disposable objects, or of the Familiar killing workers in com-
plicity with the administration, remind people, old and young, of the hard to
understand, terrifyingnature of the system at work in the cane fields.
notes
Acknowledgments. Numerouspeople providedme with valuablecriticalinsightson dif-

ferentdraftsof thisarticle.Iam particularlygratefulto GavinSmithand RichardLee,mycoadvi-
sorswhile I was at the Universityof Toronto,and to JohnComaroff,MichaelLambek,Andrew
Martindale,RobinOakley,StuartPhilpott,CeliaRothenberg,MichaelTaussig,AndrewWalsh,
and PabloWright.My cofellows in the Programin AgrarianStudiesat Yale(1999-2000) read
one of the finalversionsof this article,subjectingit to theiralwayssharpand stimulatingcriti-
cism. Thanksgo to Henry Bernstein,Rohan D'Souza, RichardGrove, JeanetteKeith,Joan
Martinez-Alier, ScottNelson,and PaulaWorby.KariJonescontributedto the shiftingshapesof
thisarticlesince itsveryconception.Thechallengingcommentsof threeanonymousreviewers
of AmericanEthnologistwere helpfulas I rethoughtthe scope of the article.I am especially
gratefulto the manyTobamen andwomenwho overthe yearshavegenerouslysharedwith me
theirvoices, experiences,and friendship.All the names of the Toba includedin the text are
pseudonyms.I presentedearlierversionsof this articleat the V CongresoArgentinode Antro-
pologia Social (July1997), the Departmentof Anthropology,Universityof Toronto(October
1998), and the Departmentof Anthropology,Universityof Chicago (April1999). Fieldwork
amongthe Tobawas conductedin 1995-96 and fundedby the Wenner-GrenFoundationfor
AnthropologicalResearch(Pre-Doctoral Grant6053), the Secretariade Cienciay Tecnica,Uni-
versidadde BuenosAires,andthe Ministryof EducationandTraining,Provinceof Ontario.
1. KahogonaGaalso means"thunder" (theletterG standsfora voiced postvelar).Among
the Tobaof the easternChaco (see Note 2), qasogonaGais a powerfulfigurewho unleashes
stormsandthundersand is also associatedwiththe Andes(Miller1975:481).Amongthe TobaI
am referring to (who live in the westernChaco),the closestequivalentis wosaq(rainbow),also
associatedwithstormsbut notwith mountains.
2. In Argentina,the Toba (Guaycurulinguisticfamily)encompass a total populationof
about30,000, mostof whom fallintosubgroupingsinhabitingthe easternsectionsof the Chaco,
in the provincesof Chaco and Formosa.TheToba I referto in this articleinhabitthe western
Chaco on the PilcomayoRiverand have been involvedin historicalprocessesdifferentfrom
those affectingthe easternToba.ThewesternTobaof the mid-Pilcomayoareculturallyand lin-
guisticallycloserto the "Bolivian"Tobaandthe Pilagathanto the easternToba,a linkthatled
AlfredMetraux(1937) to referto them as "Toba-Pilaga" (see Gordillo1999; Mendoza 1998).
Unlessotherwisestated,all futurementionof "theToba"indicatesthe westernToba.
3. The memoriesof men and women aboutthe devils and KiyaGaikpf of the plantation
shareimportantsimilarities,but mostof my interviewsinvolvedTobamen. Inthis regard,my
analysisshouldbe seen as representinga predominantly maleexperience.
4. The Devil is a thought-provoking and controversial analysis of the connections be-

tween devil imagery, commodity fetishism, and capitalist exploitation in the Cauca valley, Co-
lombia, and the Bolivian tin mines. Shamanism is a more ambitious and experimental book: a
historical and at the same time deconstructive ethnography about the complex dialectic be-
tween the terror caused by the rubber boom among the indigenous groups of the Putumayo
River (in the Colombian and Peruvian lowlands) and the conformation of shamanism as a prac-
tice with counter-hegemonic components. In both books, Taussig addresses the theme of com-
modity fetishism. In Shamanism, however, his analysis does not deal with devil imageries but
with the "fetishismof the debt" during the rubberboom.
5. In northern Argentina, the term Aborigen refers to the native groups of the Chaco and
usually excludes other indigenous groups such as the Chiriguanos and Kollas.
6. For instance, Horacio, a man in his fifties who has been involved in politics for many
years, told me: "Manypeople died there, maybe because the patr6ndidn't look afterthe people.
He didn't give medicines. He didn't send the doctor. He didn't give housing. He only gave [us]
that tolderfa [huts]."Yet, most Toba blame the payak (evil spirits)as the ultimate cause of death
and for the high death toll in the cane fields. Inthis regard,for many Toba the negative effect of
their living conditions on the plantation and the action of the payak do not exclude each other.
7. In 1967, a Toba nurse trained by the missionaries kept a record of 24 children and four
adults who died during that year at Tabacal (out of a total of probably 300 or 400 migrants).To
date, I have been unable to find other, more systematic statisticson the death toll at the ingenio.
It is very likely that the administration did not register most of these deaths (especially that of
children and babies). Like elsewhere in the Americas, the high mortality rate among these in-
digenous groups was probably related to their lack of natural defenses against new diseases.
Missionary reports about the cane fields suggest that among children the most common epi-
demics were measles and chicken pox (Bradberry1958:58; South American MissionarySociety
1938:69). Yet, my aim here is to analyze what the Toba remember of that experience and the
meanings associated with it, ratherthanto reconstruct "whatactually happened" in quantitative
or biomedical terms.
8. See Segovia 1998:165 and 167 for a similar attitude among the Wichi.
9. KiyaGaikmeans "big eater" and pi is a suffix for group of people. KiyaGaikis also the
name given to the beetle that shamans place inside a person's body to cause a disease. The dis-
ease, and the pain resulting from it, is the resultof the beetle eating flesh from within the body.
10. "Patr6n"was his father's actual surname and also a semantically thick indicator of his
status as patr6n (boss). Most Toba understood patron as in this lattercontext, usually referringto
him in Spanish as "el patr6n Costas" (boss Costas).
11. At that time, the Aborigenes formed the main group of cane cutters, a situation that
would change in the following decades. In addition to the Sikhs, the plantations brought from
overseas small groups of Russian,Japanese, Italian,and Spanish workers (Vidal 1914:13-15).
12. The only probable reference to cannibalism priorto the experience of wage labor oc-
curs in a myth (currentlyknown only by the elderly) about the origin of tobacco. Inthis myth, a
woman began eating people, among them her husband, until she was finally killed by her chil-
dren and burntto ashes. Itwas from these ashes that the plant of tobacco firstgrew. Of the doz-
ens of interviews I conducted about the KiyaGaikpi,only Segundo made a connection between
them and this myth. When I asked him whether there were KiyaGaikpi in their lands in the
Chaco, he told me: "Therearen't any around here. Only a long time ago, there was a woman
who ate her husband. But only a woman. The plant of tobacco. But a long time ago."
13. For instance, in the 1910s Criollos from the province of Chaco working in Ledesma
were horrified at the alleged "cannibalism"of the Chiriguano, who according to them had al-
ready eaten "quite many people" (Gonzalez Trilla 1921:263). Around that time, the Wichi at
Misi6n Chaquefa-not far from San Martindel Tabacal-thought that the firstEnglishmission-
aries of the South American Missionary Society, closely associated with the Englishowners of
La Esperanza,were cannibals (Makower 1989:40).
14. The literal meaning of the term Familiarin Spanish ("relative")was for some Toba a
source of speculation about the existence of a kinship relationship between the Familiarand Pa-
tr6n Costas. Moreover, Tomas told me that rather than being relatives they were maybe the
same person: "Maybe the Familiaris a familiar [relative]of Patr6nCostas. Or maybe he and Pa-
tr6n Costas are the same. He turns into the Familiar."
15. The Inquisitionused to consider heretics "those who had or had had Familiares, invok-
ing demons" (Rosenzvaig 1986:248). During the witch hunts in New England,prosecutors used
to look for "diabolical familiars" as proofs of the defendant's identity as a witch (Godbeer
1992:162).
16. Because of its widespread geography, different social groups describe the Familiar in
various ways. In some cases, people present it as a large black dog (el perro Familiar)or a large
snake (vibor6n). The Familiar is also often depicted as having a changing physical shape, in-
cluding that of a well-dressed white man (see Coluccio and Coluccio 1987:50-52; Fortuny
1974:169; Isla 1998; Isla and Taylor 1995; Jijena Sanchez and Jacovella 1939:145; Paleari
1982:185-186; Rosenberg 1936:133-137; Rosenzvaig 1986:248; Vessuri 1971:60-62).
1 7. Marc Edelman has argued, from his own field material in Costa Rica, that the imagery
of the devil pacts is rooted not only in economic exploitation but also sexual domination and
that, as a result, men thought to have pacts with the devil are often believed to have a predatory
sexuality (Edelman 1994:73, 78). This is not the case in the Toba's view of Patr6n Costas. I re-
peatedly asked men and women about Patr6nCostas's sexual reputation,and for them the topic
was simply not an issue that they knew or cared about.
18. Other laborers working in the San Francisco Valley, however, considered that it was
possible to make deals with the Devil in order to increase productivity. This is the case, for in-
stance, of the Bolivian cane cutters paid by piecework (Whiteford1981:55).
19. On this connection among the Criollos, see Vessuri 1971:62, Rosenzvaig 1986:248;
and Isla and Taylor 1995:318.
20. In his own analysis, Taussig refers to the relationship between the devil imagery and
alienation only briefly (1980:17, 37). Still, throughout the book he maintains a connection be-
tween representations of the devil and exploitative conditions of labor. In a more recent piece,
Taussig (1995:398) offered a reinterpretationof his original thesis of the devil pact in which he
does not referto labor processes and alienation. Inthis new analysis, Taussig interpretsthe devil
contract as a phenomenon of sheer excessiveness and exuberance restrictedto the sphere of cir-
culation: instances of "givingwithout receiving."
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accepted May 15, 2001

final version submittedJune 4, 2001
Gast6n Gordillo
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
261 McGraw Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
gg68@cornell.edu

Breath of The Devils

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The Breath of the Devils: Memories and Places of an Experience of Terror

Author(s): Gastón Gordillo

Atthe breathof Godtheyaredestroyed;at the blastof hisangerthey perish.

Thealienationof the workerfromhis productmeansnotonly thathis laborbecomesan

Thatplace is fullof devils.Plenty.A lot. It'scalledthe Tabacalplantation.

On a clear day in the San Francisco Valley in northwest Argentina, it is impossi-

American Ethnologist29(1 ):33-57. Copyright? 2002, American Anthropological Association.

It'shardto describe.Itwas like a diseaseattacking.I don'tknowwhatdisease,but it

This Toba group-also known as "western Toba," "iachilamolek Toba," or

work near the mountains

Figure 1. Relative location of the Toba of the mid-Pilcomayo River

death and the devils of the mountains

more ambiguous character than today. Reformulated through contradictory experi-

abundance of commodities at San Martindel Tabacal, somewhat obscuring the hor-

the KiyaGaikpi: "they didn't eat beef"

The KiyaGaikpilooked as if they were the ownersof everything.Theysay thatthey

the Familiar: "it comes out as gendarme or policia"

estrangement, fetishism, and the places of terror

"we're not going to die"

del Tabacal. In other words, paraphrasingHenri Lefebvre, it is especially in contradic-

Acknowledgments. Numerouspeople providedme with valuablecriticalinsightson dif-

4. The Devil is a thought-provoking and controversial analysis of the connections be-

accepted May 15, 2001

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