The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Pollution, Contradiction, and Salvation 119
taneously: a system of reciprocity and self-renewal together with a
system of unequal exchange and self-extinction.
This structure of opposition can also be seen within the peasant
sphere of production. It stands out clearly in the opposition between
women and men in the procreation of children and in the rejection
or acceptance of the technology of the "green revolution," which is
replacing traditional practices. The obligation to raise the children
falls to the women, but the children reciprocate that care later in
life; while the fathers are referred to as flies, "those who sting, and
fly away, leaving their eggs in old meat." The few advocates of the
techniques of the green revolution and the further commercialization
of peasant agriculture are men. The women bitterly oppose the
uprooting of the perennials that such an innovation requires. "They
give us little, but they give!" say the women, who are alienated from
the new technology. Only men drive and own tractors, and men are
favored for loans and dealings with the government. Women fear the
new financial ties, fear indebtedness, and fear a mode of cash cropping
that provides income only once or twice a year, if at all. They
fear that their offspring will die of hunger while waiting for the harvest,
and they fear the eventual loss of their land. The developmental
cycle of the peasant household focuses on the reproduction of the
maternal line. As a young household grows older, the proportion of
females living in it increases, concentrating women and land into
one productive unit. Males move into extrahousehold occupations
and residences, while the women cling to the cultivation of the perennials.
Women lend and receive between households and manage
the distribution of foodstuffs. Through the women households are
sewn together by the ties of children from many fathers. Both the
pattern of material production to which women wish to adhere and
the social pattern of reproduction of offspring in which they are implicated
are cyclical, self-perpetuating exchange structures. However,
the male peasants' pattern of exchange, in both procreation and
in the new mode of material production that they espouse, is far less
cyclical and reciprocal and tends to the extreme portrayed by the
male proletarian devil contract—the exchange that ends all exchange.
But only when the region is considered as a whole is this antithesis
clearly established, starkly experienced, and projected into the
contrast between peasant householding and agribusiness production.
A preexisting pattern of ideas immanent in culture, if only
barely and confusedly borne in consciousness, is all the more securely
fixed by the new experience which threatens the roots of that
pattern. The experience, as Levi-Strauss suggests, would remain in-