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

Preface
aim in this book is to elicit the social
Mignificance of the devil in the folklore
of contemporary plantation workers
and miners in South America. The dev-
; il is a stunningly apt symbol of the
alienation experienced by peasants as they enter the ranks of the
proletariat, and it is largely in terms of that experience that I have
cast my interpretation. The historical and ethnographic context lead
me to ask: What is the relationship between the image of the devil
and capitalist development? What contradictions in social experience
does the fetish of the spirit of evil mediate? Is there a structure
of connections between the redeeming power of the antichrist and
the analytic power of Marxism?
To answer these questions I have tried to unearth the social history
of the devil since the Spanish conquest in two areas of intensive
capitalist development: the sugar plantations of western Colombia,
and the Bolivian tin mines. One result of this inquiry (emerging
more clearly in the mines but equally pertinent to the plantations) is
that the devil symbolizes important features of political and economic
history. It is virtually impossible to separate the social history
of this symbol from the symbolic codification of the history
which creates the symbol.
The devil was brought by European imperialism to the New
World, where he blended with pagan deities and the metaphysical
systems represented by those deities. Yet those systems were as unlike
the European as were the indigenous socioeconomic systems.
Under these circumstances, the image of the devil and the mythology
of redemption came to mediate the dialectical tensions embodied
in conquest and the history of imperialism.
In both the plantations and the mines, the role of the devil in the