CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

Magic, money and alterity

. .
among Dominicans‘f

Near the Dominican-Haitian border, a number of villagers and rural people maintain
that it is possible to receive money by making a contract with the devil. The contract
means that a man or a woman accumulates wealth in return for handing over the lives
of others. However, if one lives as a devot of the devil, sooner or later one must suffer,
because, as one man said: ‘[This engagement is totally evil since] for some time they are
well, and when they [the demonic’s representatives] come, look, they’re in a hole.’
Whether a local makes evil money is clearly not only a concern for a few Domini-
cans. It is a western issue with a substantial genealogy (Simmell978; Macfarlane 1985;
Bloch 1989), and one Michael Taussig has raised in his comparative volume on Colom-
bian cane workers and Bolivian miners, The devil and commodity fetishism in South
America (1980). The abstract topic Taussig investigates in this bold analysis is how we
should understand the relationship between concepts of sorcery and visions of highly
dynamic, capitalist power. His discussion improved our insight compared with pre-
vious approaches centred on a localised image of bounded good (Foster 1965; Bailey
1971). Taussig’s study asserts that the devil beliefs it examines are shaped as a part of
transformations of rural economies into capitalism and argues that they may even
articulate a resistance to such processes.
While I fully endorse the view that sorcery today has to be contextually situated in
relation to transnationalised markets and cultures, I want to confront some other
aspects of Taussig’s thesis. Making use of the Dominican case, I shall argue that it
contains a serious challenge to his general interpretation of magic and money.
Taussig’s strong, materialist - or class - interpretation has already been under-
mined with much insight in Parry and Bloch (1989: 9, 19), Sallnow (1989), Harris
(1989) and Edelman (1994).’ These authors have devastatingly criticised his reinter-
pretation of June Nash‘s Bolivian ethnography (1979; 1989) and reproached him for
reducing the complexity of cosmological classifications. My own argument concen-
trates on such appeals to reduce reductionism. But, in addition to emphasising these
writers’ main claim - that is, the idea that we ought to approach any belief in demonic

* A first version of this paper was presented at the Graduate Seminar at the Department of Anthropology
of the University of Bergen in April 1994.I thank the organisers of the seminar, Edvard Hviding and
Geir Thomas Hylland Eriksen, for having stimulated me to write the paper; seminar participants, who
helped me sharpen its focus; and Carlotta McAllister, Eduardo Archetti and Jean-Claude Galey for
their critical comments on the later version. Fieldwork was carried out in the Dominican Republic
between August 1991 and September 1992 and was supported by the University of Oslo.
1 For a recent discussion of the relevance of Taussig’s ideas with a view to a specific case in the
Ecuadorean Andes, see Crain (1991;1994) and Hirschkind (1994).

3,2,129-146.0 1995 European Association of Social Anthropologists

Social Anthropology (1995), 129
pacts in transnationalised settings without a preformed view on the morality of
exchanges and of money - I shall stress as much the indispensability of another point
of departure for analysis. As the Dominican case demonstrates, contemporary narra-
tives of an evil contract may articulate a morality of alterity in addition to - and more
sharply than - visions of economic power. By alterity, I refer to identity differences,
the opposition of self and other. Dominicans, who live close to the border, shape a
difference between themselves and their western neighbours -the Haitians with whom
they share Hispaniola - through the symbolic construction of the devil’s money. In
this sense, they frequently nurture national identity from below by telling stories
about good and evil forces in terms of different races, different colours, and two
political territories - in a word, those of a postcolonial, but divided, island.
Before I move on to further outline the research and society in question, it is
worth underscoring the influence of the most abstract reasoning in Taussig’s book. In
spite of criticisms of his thesis: the argument about a particular connection between
the meanings of stories of evil money and the global spread of commoditised relation-
ships, continues to receive much s ~ p p o r t However,
.~ to insist, with Taussig’s gener-
alised view, in the specific American case I am writing about, we would hardly - or
only with great difficulty - get to where we can enter the popular and local construc-
tions of the Dominican nation. In order to be able to contribute more from local
stones of the devil, I must elaborate further on their social setting. The section that
follows therefore characterises relevant aspects of the Dominican nation and frontier
society.

The past and magic a s ethics

Sidney Mintz once aptly summarised the general Caribbean condition of globalisation:

T h e fact is that the Caribbean region, as the first overseas outpost of European imperialism and
capitalism, was ‘westernized’, ‘modernized’, and ‘developed’ before most of the colonial world
had even become colonial, and that the peoples of the Caribbean . . . are illiterate rather than
nonliterate; countryfied rather than rural; urbanized, but nearly without cities; industrialized, but
without factories - and, often, agricultural, but without land.
(Mintz 1974:37-8)

This formulation of paradoxes throws into relief a social world which has been
generated and moulded since the sixteenth century through movements of a shifting
and cosmopolitan pattern. Today’s large-scale Dominican international migration
brings people from almost the whole country to the US or Europe (Georges 1990;
Grasmuck and Pessar 1990; Portes and Guarnizo 1991).

2 Still, it seems that nearly all the researchers who have criticised Taussig’s theses on the devil stories
have solely or mainly dealt with the interpretation of economic power or change from slightly
different angles. General writers like Trouillot (1986)and Appadurai (1986:11) have, for example,
argued respectively that Taussig’s work is reminiscent of the unreasonable ‘dual economy’ notions
of the modernisation theorists, and that it unwarrantably maximises a contrast between gift
exchange and commodity exchange.
3 For a single, but good, illustration, see Aidan Southall’s general conclusion to an otherwise
suggestive discussion on the past and present of the Alur of Uganda (Southall 1993: 8).

130 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

 The villagers of ‘San A n t ~ n i o ’-~the poor, frontier community of some 8,000
inhabitants in which I have gathered the following material - look for a living in Santo
Domingo, and themselves travel to, or have kin in, Barcelona or New York. As in the
rest of the national territory, most locals also struggle actively in the election battles
between the country’s large parties, hoping at least to be paid a minimum salary for a
job in the public sector when, or if, their side takes home a four-year v i ~ t o r y Still,
.~
the majority in the frontier areas generate income in one way or another from agricul-
ture (a set of low-productivity activities), from extensive cattle raising, or from both.
Two other points should be better elaborated in this common Caribbean setting.
While the first throws light on the uniqueness of the formation of Dominican national-
ism, the second stresses magic in this context as practices of moral reflection based on
the constitutive concept-pair of good and evil. Dominican independence goes back to
27 February 1844, when the Haitians were expelled from the eastern two-thirds of the
island after they had ruled it for 22 years. The date is celebrated as Independence Day
across the country, in schools and public buildings, as the most significant of two
annual national commemorations. The other is 16 August, which marks the event
referred to by Dominicans as the War of Restoration (1863-65). At that time Domini-
can military forces liberated the country from the then despised Spaniards, and re-
stored the republic which had sought to become reoccupied and annexed by its mother
nation in 1861 out of fear of Haitian absorption.
A second date of importance for both the Dominican border areas and the nation
is 4 October 1937. General Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the country alone from 1930 to
1961 after a coup, that day initiated a grim massacre which cost the lives of thousands
of Haitian peasants and expelled Haitians from the country. Through infrastructure
and propaganda, the Trujilloist state began an intensified construction of Dominican
society and identity in a universe in which there had till then existed mixed Domini-
can-Haitian relations. After 1937, Trujillo adopted the name of the Father of the New
Fatherland. Until 1961, one of his principal ideologues was Joaquin Balaguer, the
current octogenarian president. Balaguer inaugurated in 1992 the amazing Columbus
lighthouse in Santo Domingo, which was intended as a symbol of the birth and growth
of Hispanic, Catholic civilisation in the New World. Any interpretation either of
frontier life or of central leadership would thus have to take great account of a nation
with strong anti-Haitian and pro-Hispanic components.
But what do we imply by nation? Benedict Anderson (1991) has convincingly
clarified how people usually imagine their nation through the vocabularies of kinship
and conceive of national classification as given in nature, on a par with skin colour.
How easy it is then to conclude with him that people tend to incorporate their political
love of their national homeland into love of their language - their ‘mother tongue’?
However, this conclusion also permits us to observe a deviant feature of the Domini-
can imagination in an American context. With good reason, Anderson claims that a

4 ‘San Antonio’ is not the real name of the village.

5 Two important years have been 1961, which is usually said to have marked the beginning of
democracy after General Trujillo’s death, and 1978, when Joaquin Balaguer transferred power to
Antonio Guzmin, the opposition’s candidate, after having ruled for 12 repressive years. The years
after 1978 have meant an end to military violence. In 1986, Balaguer returned to power based on
elections, and he repeated his victory in 1990 (the next presidential elections will be on 16
November 1995). Politics is solidly based on relationships of a patron-client kind (Krohn-Hansen
1994).

MAGIC, MONEY AND ALTERITY 131

central aspect of the new American states that originated in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries is that they did not develop in terms of opposition of
language: ‘All, including the USA, were creole states, formed and led by people who
shared a common language and common descent with those against whom they
fought’ (Anderson 1991: 47). The Dominican case is a clear exception to the overall
pattern. Dominicans created themselves, as we have seen, in wars with Haitian
invaders and masters, and language has been a constitutive :heme in their national
struggle. Today the vast majority of Dominicans would say that because they and their
island neighbours speak different languages, they must remain two separate nations.
There is another relevant characteristic of the original arrival of nationalism in
America, that Anderson also identifies. He notes, in fact, that what he describes as a
motive of fear - that is, the elite fear of negro slave or Indian uprisings (1991: 48) -
could make us see analogies with Boer nationalism a century later. A revolution that
shook the imagination of the slave-owning planters and nationalist pioneers of Amer-
ica took place precisely on the island of Hispaniola between 1791 and 1804, when the
black slave insurrection led by Toussaint Louverture created the second independent
republic in the western hemisphere. Thus Anderson takes the liberty to quote the
Liberator himself, Sim6n Bolivar, who once expressed the sentiment that a negro
revolt was ‘a thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion’! (1991: 49).
What I stress here is that there has been a continual emphasis on national identity
in the particular political universe that has its roots in the eastern part of Hispaniola;
sharing a single island with Haiti, i.e. a nation that village informants sometimes spoke
of as ‘a piece of Africa’ (anpeduzo de Africa), is the heart of the matter.6 For their
part, power-holders and writers have cultivated their bond with Europe through
Spain, and have consecrated the ancestral memory of Columbus as testimony to this.
So, only three months before the inauguration of the lighthouse on 14 October 1992,
the elected Dominican president, Joaquin Balaguer, concluded his discourse at the
second summit of Ibero-American heads in Madrid with a deeply felt homage to his
mother tongue:

In Seville, the seat of the most important of the exhibitions with which the discovery of America
will be commemorated, the 500th anniversary celebrations of the discovery, the director of the
Royal Spanish Academy, the illustrious intellectual don Fernando Lizaro Carreter, has said that
the greatest strength between Spain and the American countries is the unity and not the unifom-
ity of the language which they share and which unite them. I salute with jubilation those
illuminated and illuminating words.’

On that solemn occasion, Balaguer - who is a literary man with a large authorship -
also called Columbus ‘one of the greatest fantasies of history’. In 1927, a twenty-one-
year-old Balaguer expressed the following about the issue of strengthening the Domi-
nicanisation of the frontier through the state by promoting white immigration from
Europe and establishing agrarian colonies along the disputed demarcation line:

The most public-spirited undertaking, after the creation of the Republic, is and will be the
colonisation of the frontier. If anything Horacio Visquez (who was president in those years, the

6 It should be noted that there are extremely few examples of islands shared by nations. Comparable
cases might be New Guinea, Cyprus and Ireland.
7 Source for excerpts from this speech is the Dominican paper Listin Diurio, 24 July 1992.

132 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

 country’s first elected one) did will go into the history book with immortal glory, it will be
frontier colonization. That is the work most called on to give our nationality imperishable life.
(Quoted in Vega 1988: 18)

To sum up, the meaning of this dimension of the Dominican setting is that the
dominant and official vision of the nation’s past in the present is one shaped by, and
shaping, a radically dual island. One of the president’s books carries the affective title
The Christ ofliberty.* It narrates the anti-Haitian struggle of a man called Juan Pablo
Duarte - named universally by Dominicans as the principal of the three Fathers of the
Fatherland (10s tres Padres de la Putria). Duarte inspired the liberation in 1844, and
Balaguer’s exemplary tale is one about patriotism, victory and martyrdom. Another of
his books was published under the title of The Dominican reality in 1947. While it
resembles a scholar’s study, a distanced observer - or the country’s leading academic
historian - refers to it as ‘in reality a tendentious apology for Trujillo in the context of
a pessimistic and extreme racist interpretation of Dominican history’ (Moya Pons
1990: 711). This book appeared as part of the efforts to explain the expulsion and
slaughter of the Haitians in 1937 and to justify the Dominicanisation of the frontier. It
condenses the Trujilloist state’s vision of the roots of the social and demographic
problems of the 1940s. It would probably have become forgotten by the vast majority
of Dominicans had not Balaguer re-edited and published it again under the new title
The island on the contrary: Haiti and the Dominican destiny in 1983.9 The reception
of this book by the public was extraordinary, and its sixth edition was published in
1990. In short, what is Dominican is still being constructed to a striking measure as the
antithesis of what is Haitian. There is a hierarchical difference, according to these
powerful discourses, between a predominantly and relatively light-skinned people
with a Catholic and Hispanic culture, and those of the other side held to be negroes
and bearers of an obscure - or in part despised and in part feared - culture.
The myths of the nation are echoed among the frontier population, and sometimes
even articulated more loudly.” As we shall see, the tales in the border areas about the
making of evil money signify that a number there explicitly identify a place in Haiti as
the centre of demonic power. Or, to put it differently, nationalist and magical dis-
courses contain overlapping structures of reasoning in that they basically share ethical
premises.” Both power-holders and the locals among whom I lived construct their
arguments about the island’s main identities by forming what looks like a geography
of good and evil. The popular, moral reflection which is nurtured through and around
magic is articulated above all - or, better phrased perhaps, more routinely - in views of

8 Spanish title is EL Cristo de la Libertad. Vida de Juan Pablo Duarte ([1978] 1987).
9 Spanish title is La Isla a1 Revis. Haitiy el destino dominicano ([1983] 1990).
10 For two instructive books that situate Dominican discourses on ‘race’ and nation in comparative,
American contexts, see Graham (ed.) (1990) and Sommer (1991). Sommer’s study is brilliant and
particularly helpful in throwing light on the Dominican symbolic shaping of ‘race mixture’ through
the construction of the category of the Dominican indio - a category used regularly both by the
state and in everyday interaction for purposes of classifying a light colour of skin.T h e majority of
Dominicans see themselves and are seen as indios - i.e. between ‘whites’ (blancos),and ‘brownish-
goldens’ (mguerios) and ‘blacks’ (either, euphemistically, morenos, or, pejoratively, negros, prietos
or haitianos (Haitians)).
11 For persuasive, general argumentation about morality as the essence of history making, see Veyne
(1988).

MAGIC, MONEY AND ALTERITY 133

healing and sorcery. Before I begin to detail some stories about evil money, I shall
briefly illuminate these views, found in San Antonio, in order to underscore how
ethics shapes magical concepts - or, how ordinary people fill their imagination with
forms of evil and good whenever they face everyday dilemmas. In addition, to expand
on the topic of the local conceptualisation of money, I must clearly explain a bit more
about the San Antonio past of property and accumulation.
One villager may throw light on what I take to be the essence of the moral
construction of healing.12 This reflective man, a former public employee of peasant
stock, provides an answer to the question of why some persons who seek a magician
are able to find relief with the aid of a saint, while others cannot be healed. His
explanation, which is shared by others, is that if a bad person wishes to be healed, the
spiritual power actually

works against him .. . For he has a case with God . . . for example, he kills another’s animal .. .
then this person has a case with God, hasn’t he? He has a case. Then this person goes to where
that mystery [‘mystery’ is a synonym for ‘saint’, as are the words of ‘being’ and ‘spirit’] is . ..
They go and sometimes they [the mystery or the healer] tell them that no, you did this and that,
you find no cure because you did this . . . So, if [the healer has] . . . a mystery of God, those
persons who have done evil ... that mystery doesn’t enter them, it despises them. If it is a
question of a person who is clean, who doesn’t do any evil, he goes and the mystery joins you . . .
Yes, the difference which exists is that one .. . because I believe that, in the world, there are things
.. . in the world, there is found a bit of everything, there is evil and there is good, isn’t there? [Evil
is found] because there is a being whom they name the Devil, a being; there are two beings, God
and the Devil who came to the world .. . So the Devil lives with the evil faith and God lives with
good faith.

So healers and clients are well equipped for living with a collective and individual truth
which says that their rituals and beliefs may trigger off God’s healing miracles, but also
produce little curing effect or add to the clients’ pain. The same ritual performances
can result both in increased sanity and in punishment, either in a testimony of sal-
vation to come or in a sign of lasting suffering. People here think about the true effects
of curing as much in terms of keeping out and giving shape to evil as in terms of
producing health. But no person, this man claimed, should be said to be born bad. It
depends on your social form of being: ‘They pick it up later, from a bad manner, from
an evil faith, because nobody is born thief, nor is anybody born evil’. Locals’ continual
‘readings’ of each other’s daily interactions therefore justify magical healing. The key
distinction - as the above quotation demonstrates - is also frequently shaped in terms
of differences of persons’ purity - or their blood (a short, or no, step from race).
Persons and hearts are endlessly spoken of as ‘dirty’ (stln’os) or ‘clean’ (Zimpios),
implying evil or good. Blood of evil and good persons respectively are said to be
heavy’ @esadu) and ‘light’ (Ziviana); or ‘sour’ (ugria) and ‘sweet’ ( d d e ) . Even the
saints are contemplated through such language; some mysteries may be ‘sweet’, and
others ‘sour’. Is the use of such language metaphoric? Of course it is.13But the moral
universe it builds and communicates is real enough to be practised and interpreted
‘thickly’ in a Geertzian style.

12 Broadly based discussions of Dominican magic and healing - often based on possession - may be
found in Deive ([1975] 1988), Davis (1987), and Martinez (1991).
13 I have felt forced to make this explicit after Roger Keesing’s justified criticism of over-interpret-
ation of the daily metaphors we all seem to live by (Keesing 1987: 167).

134 C H R I S T I AN K R 0 H N - HA N S E N
 Also the explanations of sorcery work from the bases of a real human possibility
of accumulating guilt from doing evil. Now, as many San Antonio people say, there
are a number of magicians who know how to produce destruction on both sides of the
frontier. The people I know take it for granted, therefore, that guilt exists in many
forms both among themselves and others. However, they still appear to skew their
own ethnographies of evil in the direction of Haitian roots. It is true that they also
mention extremely knowledgeable individuals, and potent sorcerers, among them-
selves. In San Antonio, many have sought reputed sorcerers in the hills near the town
of San Juan de la Maguana. But many have in addition crossed the border on errands of
magic.
Two illustrations will draw the contours of these sorcery visions. A woman healer
who works in the capital prided herself for performing only good actions of curing,
and - in order to stress her point - told me about a female client who had recently
come from New York to see her. She had offered her three thousand dollars for
‘rendering a female rival inanimate’. But she had answered her with a prayer (which
she said was the Magnificat in Latin) - and with these words told her to go to Haiti,
where they can do anything: ‘Look senora, you must go to a Haitian who works with
the two lines. They work with the white line and the black line. They do evil to make
money, they do dirty work‘. In addition, the many Haitian peasants who migrate to
work on Dominican lands are sometimes perceived through visions of dangerous
capacity for sorcery. An old village woman remembered this story of how a property’s
fertility had become barren: ‘Look, here came a Haitian. It was when my husband was
alive. He [the Haitian] prepared the garden for the husband of a daughter of mine. He
prepared it, and there they never harvested again. It was like it was out of order. And
they found a bottle laid in the earth. So, they smashed the bottle and realized it
contained many foul-smelling things’.
People therefore incorporate those of the other side into an ambiguous under-
standing which says that Haitians are both inferior and strong. For those of the other
side not only belong to a stigmatised class of people, but are also breeders of destruc-
tive and dangerous magic.14 We shall see this understanding more sharply profiled
through the subsequent stories on dirty money.

Stories of the devil

While the first part of this section sheds light on general aspects of the local belief in
devil pacts, the last part deals with specific stories told among people of San Antonio.
Many - but far from all - in the frontier provinces nourish ideas which explicitly

14 Since this article seeks to criticise a work by Taussig, I should stress an instructive,although tragic,
parallel to the process I discuss here, which is found in one of his more recent books, Shamanism,
colonialism and the wild man (1987: 3-135). This book has pierced the cultural dynamic of a social
landscape in which the Indian of the jungle - rather than the negro - both carries a stigma, and is
actively sought for his particular knowledge. Taussig’s analysis from the Putumayo region at the
beginning of this century shows that, through the interactions between western myths of savagery
and a cultural classification of wildness rooted in pre-conquest societies, the Indians of the low-
lands became ambiguously imagined and treated as aucas; in the eyes of the colonists, they were
both animal-like and human-like, and they were simultaneously despised and feared as controllers
of great magic. More generally, Taussig’s recent books (1987; 1993), compared with his early work
demonstrate an increased understanding of the complexity of symbolic processes.

MAGIC, M O N E Y AND ALTERITY 135

identify the demonic with a place in Haiti (Deive 1988: 257-58). This place is the
coastal village of Arcahaie situated between Port-au-Prince and Gona’ives, which is
generally regarded as an important centre of ~orcery.’~
Such ideas are focused on the evil spiritual power known under the name of back.
Between a back spirit and the spirit’s owner exists a personal contract. Either the back
protects the owner’s properties or the person receives a lot of money. When money is
involved, the person must deliver other people’s -particularly close relatives’ - lives. A
person who houses a back in order to get rich is therefore a seller of people. Those who
are sold, suddenly die, and are later removed from their tombs and transported to
Arcahaie where they are forced to work for the devil. Most backs have been bought
from sorcerers in Haiti. In brief, we are dealing with a belief which provides expla-
nations both for cases of unexpected death and for forms of capital accumulation.
What follows is how a healer - i.e. an expert - clarified some meanings implied when it
is said that a person has a back. A few of the details may not be shared by others,
because buck stories vary from one person to another. But her main points - the
contract, the continuous obligation to sell one’s most beloved, the exportation of the
dead to Haiti in the shape of an animal, the drudgery of labour and the food in
Arcahaie that lacks salt - constitute a language which is recognised, and thus shared,
even by the villagers who do not themselves believe in backs.

They learned that in Haiti. In Haiti, they make a pact in order to obtain baci .. . baci is the evil
spirit. So, they make a pact with that person and that person sells you a baci. They belong to the
people who work with black magic . . . To get a lot of money people go to Haiti. But . . . that
which concerns back is a very dirty engagement, an evil engagement, I detest it, hallelujah! . . . He
who buys the baci has to fulfil the commandment of the baci. From all the people who have baci,
they always demand the person they love most, be it their most loved child or be it their mother
or their wife. Then that person dies like that, without being ill, and it’s the baci that takes the
..
person away . After the most loved person of the bad owner dies, it gives him lots of money, it
makes him rich .. . Then, having given it the first people, the most loved, then they may give from
the pueblo, any person from the pueblo . . . The person who is sold dies at home and they bury
him.But after three days, they take him out of the tomb ... when they see that the grave sinks,
they say ‘Oh, it’s that they took him out’, ‘That one was sold’ . . . After three days, at midnight,
they take out the body . . . and [the baci] takes it away like it were a head of cattle, or like it were
an animal, it converts it into an animal . . . it takes it to Haiti, like a cow. But after entering Haiti, it
turns it into a person again. The sold are kept in Arcahaie, a place in Haiti which is named
Arcahaie. There people cannot go visiting; for if they don’t know to defend themselves, they are
left nailed there . . . And they give them food without salt and use them for working.. . They have
estates, and those workers are dead that they kill here . . . they are people like sleepwalkers, who
don’t have that spirit, but do what they order them to do. They spend the day working like an ox
and don’t feel, they don’t feel anything, only work like an ox. For that do they use them.

Backs may be found in the form of any animal or person. As one man said, ‘it even
becomes a dog, it turns itself into a cow, they say; it turns itself into a person, it turns
itself into a woman’.
Two processes should be stressed concerning the thought on the place of Arca-

15 According to Deive (1988: 257-58), Arcahaie is also considered to be a centre for sorcerers who
prepare and sell zombies: i.e. dead persons who are removed from their tombs and revived through
magic in order to put them to work. In San Antonio, I never heard about zombies. Nevertheless,
the word zombie is employed by Dominicans in a frontier community located in the Central
Highlands (Marit Brendbekken, personal communication).

136 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

haie. Firstly, we are definitely dealing with mythical geography - or symbolic terri-
tories. Many read this remote area across the border not only as the demonic centre,
but as containing such activity that it should not be approached unless one is equipped
with sufficient knowledge for one’s defence. Secondly, however, this power rooted in
Arcahaie not only stimulates fear. It also propels thought on self and other in terms
that distinguish humanity from slave-like or animal-like existence. The discourse on
salt eating is a key to these views. The hybridism of the figures working in Arcahaie is
reproduced through food that does not include salt. This is the same criterion as
Taussig has told us that the Whites and Spanish-speaking Indians of the Putumayo
used in discriminating indios from infieles - Indians from infidels: ‘While the indios are
Quechua-speaking, salt-eating, semi-Christians, the injieles, also known as aucas,
speak other languages, rarely eat salt, and know nothing of baptism or the Catholic
Church’ (Taussig 1987: 97). In line with this comparison, those who are sold to
Arcahaie are transported across the deepest possible division - beyond the threshold of
savagery. Asked about why Arcahaie only provides food that lacks salt, some are
without an answer. But some say that it is for a reason, which a leading healer in the
village gave in words that point to Taussig’s first marker of difference, the one depen-
dent on communication through words:

If they give them food with salt, they get out and speak. They don’t speak, they have become
silent . . . and they can’t give them salty food because already they [are] like animals without
reason. And if they give them food, they give them food without salt; they come back; so, it’s said
that they keep them there detained. But there, nobody speaks, because if you speak then you
know that is different, and they cannot speak due to the fact that they maintain them in that
substance.

These - sometimes, it must be confessed, impenetrable - discourses on Arcahaie

and backs classify radical alterity. In addition, all say that the back ends by taking also
the life of the owner. If one lives as a devot of the devil, sooner or later one must
suffer: ‘[This engagement is totally evil because] for some time they are well, and when
they come, look, they’re in a hole’.
Those who are accused of housing a back are of different types. Some may be
owners of cattle; others have land; others own houses in the village - or simply a tiny
store in a barrio or hill hamlet. A peasant explained: ‘There are many different backs
. . . there are many backs that are for selling people and many backs for working and
many backs for raising animals. It is not a single back for selling people; no, [there are]
for the animal raising and for the stores and for growing beans and for everything, it is
not a single road, there are several.’ For example, villagers would draw a division
between the backs of two locals. I will look at these cases; they bring us closer to the
contested aspect of this symbolic process - that is, the understanding of capital
accumulation. However, first I shall outline San Antonio’s history of property.
The community’s flat and irrigated lowlands, which offer the best agricultural
opportunities, are largely owned by a single family - the Hernindez family. Their
accumulation began in the early 1920s. A few years earlier, the first Hernindez, called
Virgilio, had settled in San Antonio. He arrived from a nearby village, and was San
Antonio’s political head until the late 1930s. During the Trujillo regime (1930-61),
local leadership was in the hands of one of Virgilio’s nephews, called Jaimito. Both the
latter and a third Hernindez - another of Virgilio’s nephews, whose name was Max -

M A G I C , M O N E Y AND ALTERITY 137

gradually bought property in the lowlands. When Jaimito sold his land to Max’s
successors (or grown children) in the 1960s and left for Santo Domingo, they became
owners of most of the good land in San Antonio.“ Max’s successors consist of two
married brothers in their fifties, of whom the younger, Manuelito, has always lived in
San Antonio. The other lives in the capital. The production is little advanced and
limited: raising cattle for sale of meat, milk and cheese, with large sections of their
property in fact lying fallow. In addition, Manuelito runs one of the village’s two
largest stores.
In San Antonio, many say that the earlier generations of the Hernindez - or
Virgilio, Jaimito and Max - were ‘dirty’ people, meaning that they accumulated wealth
with the aid of backs. Indeed, as a stranger in San Antonio, it takes time and patience to
be able to discuss the power of backs - not only because any discourse on evil may
provoke fear or anger, but also because, in the minds of so many villagers, the
association between backs and the Hernindez appears to be constructed so immedi-
ately, and therefore so imp1i~itly.l~ I return to these ideas about the earlier generations
of the Hernindez.
Today’s generation is represented by Manuelito. The locals differ in their views on
him. A few villagers’ deaths have been blamed on his having sold them. And he keeps
away from wakes with the possibility of these accusations in mind. However, a
majority of those who hold back notions contend that Manuelito’s b a d is just for
protection of his land and cattle, not for selling people. Apart from Manuelito, locals
also accuse a female trader, named Juana. However, a difference is typically observed
between the two persons’ backs. As a man told, Juana’s back is ‘for selling people, [but
that of Manuelito is] for having cattle . .. Manuelito doesn’t have for doing anyone
evil, but only for making his interests yield’.
The story of Juana is dramatic. She started with the selling of lottery tickets. After
a number of years, she ran a large local lottery trade, lent out money, and owned five
houses in the village. Many were certain that she sold people. During a time, as a
woman who believed in Juana’s innocence and in her hard labour, expressed it, ‘If one
fell from a truck, it was her; when a child became ill, it was her’. In the night, some
people threw stones at her home. In the mid-I98Os, she and her husband sold and
moved to the capital. Villagers asserted that she left because of her dirtiness - or
because of the accusations.’*
However, back power did not cease to function after Juana left. Several were said
to own backs while I lived in the community. Stories about a b a d seen in a household
as a crab pervaded the whole village after a young man fell from a truck on the road
and died. His relatives then learned from a magician who had sold him. A letter which
reached me in 1993 explained that a friend had lost his life in a similar accident, and
that it was thought in the neighbourhood that he had been traded.
It seems evident that the different narratives about the backs of the Hernindez,

16 The rest of the community’s lands are mostly situated in non-irrigated, often remote, hills. On
these, peasants and villagers grow coffee and beans, and keep some animals.
17 People sometimes fear that if they either narrate or accuse, this may become known by the b a d or
the owner, and they may be punished.
18 At the time they left, Juana’s husband found himself in trouble with the law after an episode which
had resulted in a villager’s death. There is therefore disagreement as to what triggered the couple’s
final decision to go to Santo Domingo.

138 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

Juana and the other locals who are accused of having entered a pact with demonic
forces to obtain money and/or protection, constitute and shape views precisely on
these people’s accumulation. My own arguments against Taussig’s text on fetishism
therefore do not rely on an attempt to change this truth. Instead, I shall seek to
communicate the basic relevance of two other, general, ideas - ideas which I elaborate
in the next section, but will also formulate briefly here.
First, we should not go directly from the observation of a moral condemnation of
specific cases of capital accumulation to asserting that any generation of capital is
judged in the same way - that is, as supporting evil through the destruction of social
relationships. We need to relate stories of a few cases of capital as having been
produced by people said to be ‘dirty’, to general ideas about money and accumulation
in the society in question.
Second, it is indispensable to recognise that these devil-pact narratives can also
order and stimulate ideas about a number of other social dimensions besides those
defining economic power and inequality. In the Dominican case, the devil belief and
the back stories - or what can be described as a local demonology - articulate a specific
reasoning about Hispaniola’s division and about national identity. We have already
seen this by contextually situating the back stories in relation to (a) the local notions of
Arcahaie, as a demonic centre in Haiti, and (b) ideas about sorcery and healing. What
follows shows that the stories about backs in addition interact with, and are rooted in,
San Antonio people’s making of their local history. Some of their stories of the
community’s past maintain the baci belief. The central themes of these narratives
shape visions both of the power of the Hernbdez, and of the Dominican-Haitian
relationship.
The local woman who married the first Hernindez who settled in San Antonio,
was named Dulce. She had been married in Port-au-Prince, and already possessed her
own small capital when she became married again to Virgilio. A villager around ninety,
in good shape, who used to take cattle to Haiti with Virgilio in the 1920s, told about
this woman, and about a back she brought into the family:

[Dulce] married a Frenchman; not a negro, not a Haitian, a Frenchman from France . .. I knew
them. I even went to their home where they lived in Haiti . . . they lived in the capital . . . Then,
later, there came a thing going, extra-legal, like bacci, it’s said with b u d . . . Then the bucd asked
his woman of him, of the Frenchman, and he didn’t want to. And ‘pao’, they took him [instead].
so, the woman remained a widow there. She asked her family here, the Martinez’, to go bring her
back.. . they went with six mules to carry that removal load. And it appears that the woman then
entangled herself in something, with the damned what do I know, and brought it here. And here
those two persons [Virgilio and Dulce] made it.

A community majority appear to know this story in some brief version; in Virgilio’s
home, there was a baci, because Dulce had returned from the other side with one.
Furthermore, the tale is closely connected with another, a story which explains the
relationship between two locals’ deaths. The person who first lost her life was a
daughter of one of Virgilio’s contemporaries, perhaps a rival to his community role.
His name was Evaristo. Thereafter occurred the death of Dulce. A woman, who has
frequented the house of the Hernindez since her childhood, narrated it like this:

M A G I C , M O N E Y A N D ALTERITY 139
 Here lived a girl [the daughter of Evaristo]. She never married. She was a tall girl. She was a
dressmaker. And that girl died like this. She left for Barahona [a coastal town] and travelled by
train; and returning from there, she fell off and got killed . . . thereafter her father realised that
they had sold her and this man travelled to Arcahaie. And he saw her there, and spoke with her.
She told him ‘Look,it was Dulce Martinez who sold me.’ So, he sought [sorcery knowledge], and
he killed her.

This tale states that Evaristo accompanied his daughter right into the sorcery
centre. There he obtained the truth about the genesis of her death. Thereafter he made
the woman who had sold her, wither away herself. Different versions of precisely how
Dulce lost her life exist. But they contain a shared feature: that before dying in an ugly
manner she turned her secret evil into public knowledge by naming all those locals she
had sold. In the words of one: ‘Father and mother told me stories. The old people,
they have said that she was a dangerous and evil person. When she died, they even had
to cut off her tongue’.
While Balaguer, the president, has narrated the history of the nation through
shaping Duarte, the Father of the Fatherland, as a Christ-like figure (thereby implying
that the Haitians’ domination of the whole island, against which he fought, was the
product of the power of the Anti-Christ), villagers tell the history of power in San
Antonio in terms of a genealogy connecting local power with a specific devil in Port-
au-Prince. Both the past of the former (and that of the patriotic historians on whose
texts he has relied and elaborated) and the past of the latter, draw attention to the
island’s boundary as a morally constituted one.
It goes without saying that, looked at as a form of local interaction, the back
storytelling is connected with disruptive effects. Several persons, for instance, avoid
having coffee in the households of particular neighbours believed to be dangerous.
Others choose not to go to a wake out of indignation or fear. In addition, back
discourse is, of course, positioned. People’s detailed knowledges are interwoven with
the structures of their networks. To illustrate this, the woman who told above about
Evaristo, was convinced that Dulce and Max had been back owners; but she said about
those in the neighbourhood who now accuse her own daughter, or the latter’s hus-
band: ‘What will they have! They are people who have worked a lot .. . they have
[plots] in the hill and they harvest millet and other things, and they say he has back. He
has his cows, he sells a calf every now and again and they’re saying that he has back.
Let God help him accumulate.’

Accumulation a n d a i t e r l t y
As I have stated in the introduction, the argument advanced here, is that Dominicans
next to the border reflect on themselves as being different from those who occupy the
other side of their island, also through the construction of devil imageries. In arguing
this, I have chosen to place strong emphasis on the fact that stories of evil contracts and
dirty money, which appear in different forms in several corners of today’s global
society,” draw on and shape an ethics of racial, ethnic or national differences - that is
to say, either in addition to, or far more clearly than, a moral judgment of economic

19 See Edelman’s (1994: 80, note 1) list of references; this identifies a large number of ethnographies
mentioning stories of devil pacts in the following countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru,
Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Trinidad, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Spain, Greece, Kenya, and Cameroon.

140 C H R I S T I AN K R 0 H N - H AN S E N
and capitalist differences. In a recent discussion of some Central American peasant
narratives of the devil pact, Marc Edelman (1994) has convincingly shown that such
storytelling may even be inextricably tied to a local imagery of gender. Further, as
Edelman’s fundamental reasoning runs, it adds full support to my own view. ‘The
basic argument’, as he emphasises, ‘is that in rural Latin America devil-pact stories
constitute a significant, nearly ubiquitous cultural matrix through which to view
relations of power . ..’ (Edelman 1994: 60).
In short, all this means that Taussig’s thesis about the devil and changes in
American societies lacked the dynamic vitality of sufficient, theoretic openness. I shall
now stress the way this Dominican case leads to a clear rejection of his views on two
fundamental points. Firstly, Taussig’s perspective entails that the idea that the devil
contract is seen as a popular evaluation not of relationships of evil, but of the process
delimited as capitalist transformation and subversion of society. His attention is
centred on exploitation in commoditised relationships, and on magic as articulating an
ethically rooted resistance to domination based on such relationships. I shall not deny
that the analysis of this kind of protest may be plausible as one among many possi-
bilities when we consider the political potential of uses of sorcery. However, in the
Dominican case, magic does not articulate any criticism against the hegemony of
money. What is being condemned is not money, which is part of human relations, but
certain ways of acquiring it. Dominican explanations concentrate not on the ‘dirty’
features of every type of capital accumulation, but on these aspects attached to particu-
lar properties, animal raising and stores. Rather, people largely take it for granted that
money is accumulated through labour and the market. However, sometimes, many
nurture doubts that an accumulation has in fact occurred through these ‘real’ forms.
As a peasant, who explained me so many differences between persons with ‘sour’ and
‘sweet’ blood, opined in rather complex fashion:
Living forever isn’t an illusion, is it? It isn’t an illusion, because illusion is an envious thing no, do
you understand me? Illusion is a treacherous thing, the ambition, the person who lives with
..
ambition isn’t good . . . interest isn’t good . You should work without ambition; work with will,
yes, but without ambition . . . You can accumulate; but not if you say that you are going to
accumulate to be rich with ambition. The wealth is good, with ambition it is not good.

To go a step further, the articulation of the buck belief in this setting represents not
at all a radical or progressive, nor, for that matter, a subaltern, perspective on normal
bourgeois exploitation, as Taussig’s text would lead us to argue. Rather, it is grounded
deeply in ethical visions and ways of reasoning among the people which serve to define
money as a buttress of routine living. This general view even finds support in findings
from an entirely other, cosmological order: ‘Sorcery, at least in Sri Lanka, is deeply
conservative’, Kapferer (1988: 235) has written, ‘and is intimately connected with the
forces of domination and oppression, as it was in the past. Sorcery in Sri Lanka,
.
incidentally, is not a modern practice .. it stretches deep into Sri Lanka’s ancient past’.
My second criticism of Taussig’s interpretation builds strongly on the first. It
deals with the very complex images which are reproduced through any form of belief.
Among the Dominicans I know, this would entail a harmful distortion to maintain
that the thought on the demonic contract preoccupies itself only with economic
Difference. For - as has been shown - the bucd notions contain important perspectives
on differences of nations, and on spatial-territorial differences. The bucd storytelling
articulates views of the national boundary in ways that both overlap with, and shar-

MAGIC, MONEY A N D ALTERITY 141

pen, the arguments of patriotic history. In San Antonio, two processes testify in a
strikingly clear manner to such overlap. One refers to tales of the local past. The other
comments on an international event that recently took place on the island.
The story of Dulce and Virgilio, which includes the narration of the first case of
buck power in the community, makes the point that the devil pact was literally
imported through a marriage bound to the Haitian capital. People’s telling of this story
inescapably produces meaning - as we saw - through images of their island as divided
in different ‘colours’, and different territories. The patriotic history’s arguments about
the other side of the island as a breeding ground of evil, about the destructive impli-
cations of boundary crossings, about not only savagery but also ‘cruelty’ as emanating
from the western part (remember how Dulce died), and about the need for clear
segregation of kin and outsiders, are all evident in this narrative. This demonstrates
further that there is a broad basis for experiences of the island and the nation in terms
of moral alterity. The story communicates that Dulce died in a terrible, but justified,
manner after events which had resulted in a wrong mestizuje - one linking a Domini-
can family to the power of the Haitians and France?’ Her kinsmen, the Martinez of
San Antonio, who initially stayed at home, but thereafter went to bring her back,
seemed to realise better than her that the boundary of the island had to exist.
Finally, an international event was strikingly perceived in San Antonio after the
1978 election. On that occasion Balaguer lost to Antonio Guzmin, the opposition
candidate.” After the transfer of power, GuzmPn arrived at the border in order to
meet with his colleague, Jean Claude Duvalier. At least a few villagers must have said
to each other that the negotiations between the two political heads would even treat
the destructive effects of buck power, because a journalist found reason to write on
local views that:
.. . the dead were troublesome ... they set out from Arcahaie and spread throughout Haiti.
Guzmin and Jean Claude came together in order to regulate this: Duvalier gathered them and
came to the frontier in order to hand over to Guzmin the dead Dominicans that had been sold
and that were causing problems . . . even the children talked about it. ‘My uncle comes tomorrow,
Uncle Jacinto will come!’

The origin of the fetishism term in Mam’s writings is linked to his reading of A.
Herrera’s (1730) History ofthe West Indies.22Herrera narrates that in 1511 a cacique -
called Hutuey - of the island of Cuba, heard that Don James Columbus had decided to
sail from Hispaniola to Cuba. Hatuey therefore reminded his people of their many
sufferings under the Spaniards and told them that “‘They did all that for a great Lord

20 Dominican patriotic history has represented the contact and relationship with France (instead of
with Spain) as a ‘downfall’. As Moya Pons has written, ‘The surrender of [the colony of] Santo
Domingo to France [as a part of the Treaty of Bask] in 1795 ranks as one of the great traumas in the
history of the Dominican nation. It disrupted the Spanish colonial system and plunged the country
into a turbulent torrent of [black] revolutions, [the Dominican-Haitian] wars and [Haitian]
invasions [up till 18571’ (Moya Pons 1984: 245).
21 What I relate here is based on an article in a Dominican journal published in 1980,which I first read
after the fieldwork. Among other things, the article tells that ‘everybody took it for granted in San
Antonio that the first meeting of Guzmin with Duvalier at the frontier (in May last year) was held
to resolve problems that were occurring in the “other world” . . .’ For the sake of anonymity, no
reference is given.
22 See McNeill(l988: 13). I thank Desmond McNeill for having drawn my attention to this relation-
ship and to his treatment of it; I rely heavily on what he has written.

142 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

they were very fond of, which he would show them,” and then taking some Gold out
of a little Palm-tree Basket, added “. .. therefore let us . . . dance to him, to the end that
when they come he may order them not to do us harm”’ (Herrera 1730: 10, quoted in
McNeill 1988: 12). Marx, more than three hundred years later, perceives the members
of the Rhineland Assembly in terms that are similar in the sense of being those of a
stranger. His attack on the views expressed in their debates concerning the theft of
wood finishes with these words: ‘The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the
Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour.. . and then threw it into the sea. If the
Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would
they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish?’ (Marx and Engels 1975:
262).
Nothing of all this, however, justifies the general argument of Taussig’s book. On
the contrary, it undermines it. For this eminently stresses that outsiders’ unexplained
narratives of alterity have been woven into critical perspectives on fetishism from the
first. While Marx knew little about the savages’ ideas which he Taussig’s
text about commoditised relationships, looks above all - and in this we find its value -
as a gloomy celebration of his fearful vision of the human suffering which is possible
given demonic oppression.

Conclusion
This discussion has been based on three theoretical ideas about the generation of local
realities in global relationships. Two are only implicit in what I have argued; and I
choose here to mainly stress these. Thereafter I further underscore an argument from
the last section.
First, the Dominican data to some extent modify an often reproduced vision of the
Caribbeanz4 The vision I refer to is one that appears to emphasise intense individual-
ism after several hundred years of imperialism, plantations and wage labour (Abra-
hams 1983; Lieber 1981; Miller 1991) to such a degree that a relevance of social
dilemmas or choices tied to the reproduction of large collectivities is strikingly weak-
ened. What I claim is not that San Antonio people - or other islanders of the Carib-
bean for that matter - do not adjust their current values to those of advanced individu-
alism. Many descriptions of their personal styles and tastes (concerning migration and
consumption), and - above all - of their taken-for-granted right to contest and argue
with one another, could have been given in order to emphasise this.25 Still, my basic
argument is that in what constitutes the second largest of the Caribbean island states
(with a population of around seven million), a deep involvement in the morality of
making and protecting a nation was observed. This involvement is found in urban
landscapes and pueblos after 500 years of imperialist generation of division and frag-
mentation.
In addition, this also illuminates why ‘the Caribbean’ is - and has to be - such a
problematic category (Hoetink 1985). Ethnographies of Caribbean men and women as
fierce individualists have largely been produced from the non-Hispanic islands - or,

23 T h e studies of Todorov (1992)and Mason (1990)have demonstrated the extent to which peoples of
Europe and America have interacted on the bases of ideas that have reproduced mutual cultural
distance.
24 I thank Eduardo Archetti for his valuable comments concerning this point.
25 Such descriptions are omitted because of limited space.

MAGIC, MONEY AND ALTERITY 143

from Caribbean societies with pasts that are simply experienced differently from those
of the peoples of Hispaniola.
Second, the theme which has shaped the preceding discussion, is one revolving
around the comparative analysis of nations. Dealing with it, even though I have relied
on Anderson’s work, has proved, all the same, to correct a premise of his text. Let me
use as my point of departure a question: How would we most fruitfully illuminate the
reproduction of different nations? Anderson’s answer is of a depressingly universalist
nature, because it claims that nationalisms are products of the spread of print capital-
ism. As Kapferer has instructively observed, however, there is a paradox here, which
means that Anderson has in fact retreated from his own analytic suggestion: ‘[while
he] stylistically would appear to wish to break with the universalist formalist linearities
of the modernists [he] is tied to their frameworks of understanding . .. That is, he pays
scant attention to the style of the imaginary, its “logic” or argument’ (Kapferer 1992:
ix-x). Or to put it differently, having insisted on the study of the symbolic - and
therefore many - forms of nations, Imagined communities ultimately reduces them to
a single process of globalisation.
Yet, my own view is that we must analytically distinguish the category of nation
from that of capitalism. I am not saying that we might ignore the meanings of
transformation through capital - nor that the spread of the printed word is of little
importance, but, instead, that ‘nation’ and ‘capitalism’ have to be maintained as two
different categories for investigation and analysis, and that the issue of how they are
related in specific cases, ought to be cross-culturally approached as an open one. My
analysis has discussed both aspects - both capital and effects of the spread of printed
texts. In particular, it has revealed the relevance of leaders’ books and speeches among
Dominicans for communication about their nation. Still, nations - as we have also seen
- become formed by dissimilar imaginations. And they strive to achieve their aims in
divergent relationships. We should therefore seriously address the topics mentioned
above - those of nations’ ways of reasoning, their narratives and their ethics of good
and evil forces. For, as a few frontier Dominicans have shown us here, even an
elaborated - but exceedingly different - demonology may contribute to the building of
a nation.
Third, we must free devil-pact stories from specific, academic ideas about exploi-
tation and popular resistance. Rather, the narratives they order and produce should be
approached as a cultural form with many possible meanings. Its popular interpretation
is flexible, but closely tied to context. Yet, it offers a strong, forceful construct.
Precisely as such, it must be apt for constituting meaning in a whole set of differen-
tiated relationships of power, combining, or separately referring to, class, gender,
‘race’, identity and/or nation building.
Christian Krohn-Hansen
Centre for Development and the Environment
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1116
Blindern N-0317 Oslo
Norway

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Note: While reading the proofs of this article, I discovered the existence of an article called: ‘Haitians
Magic and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican borderland, 1900 to 1937’ recently
published by Lauren Derby in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (1994), pp. 488-526.
Derby’s article deals from an historian’s perspective with several of the issues discussed here in my own
article.

146 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN