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

xiv Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
flourishing if inchoate Green movement. The memory of the values
embedded in previous ways of working the land, embedded in the
devil contract, have, if anything, grown in vigor and imagination.
For those of us in North America and Europe, having lived the
past three decades under the impact of the so-called free market
unleashed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, referred to as
"neo-liberalism," and now having witnessed the apocalyptic impact
of economic deregulation under George W. Bush, the devil contract
is more relevant than ever. This same free market orientation has, of
course, been fortified over the past two decades in Colombia, where
the short-term work contract has become de rigueur, spelling out in
gruesome detail all that was mythologized in the stories about the
devil contract in the cane fields back in 1970. What was once stories
is now real.
Anthropology of the strange and exotic can teach us as much about
ourselves and our own economic system as it does about the exotic.
In trying to explain the strange and the unknown, we must never
lose sight of how truly strange is our own reality. If commodity fetishism
can be glossed as that which makes people into things and
things into people, then—to the extent we see ourselves as strange—
it might be possible to de-alienate ourselves and others in a new
world in which the fantasy powers of fetishism become liberating
and even the devil has to mend his ways.
Michael Taussig
High Falls
New York State
July 2009