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

Preface xvii
bo, I spent almost four years in and around that area. We worked
mainly as anthropologists, and were involved in the militant peasant
political organization that flourished there in the early 19703.
That experience and the ethnography compiled during that time
form the basis for the first half of this book. Without Anna's assistance
and the active collaboration of the peasants and day laborers
involved in that struggle, this book would not have been written.
Most of chapter 3 has appeared previously in Marxist Perspectives
(Summer, 1979), and chapter 6 contains a great deal of an article I
published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (April,
1977)-
Part II concerns the significance of the devil in the Bolivian tin
mines, and here I have had to rely heavily on the writing of others.
Especially important to me have been the works of June Nash, Juan
Rojas, John Earls, Jose Maria Arguedas, Joseph Bastien, and Weston
LaBarre, as cited in the bibliography. To these authors, and many
others referred to in the following pages, I am highly indebted.
I am grateful to the following institutions for their funding of my
fieldwork in western Colombia since 1970: the University of London,
the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation,
the National Science Foundation, and the Rackham School
of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I
owe special thanks to David Perry of the University of North Carolina
Press for his meticulous editing.