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

CHAPTER I
Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction
his book attempts to interpret what are to us
Tin the industrialized world the exotic ideas of
some rural people in Colombia and Bolivia concerning
the meaning of the capitalist relations of
production and exchange into which they are
daily being drawn. These peasants represent as vividly unnatural,
even as evil, practices that most of us in commodity-based societies
have come to accept as natural in the everyday workings of our
economy, and therefore of the world in general. This representation
occurs only when they are proletarianized and refers only to the way
of life that is organized by capitalist relations of production. It neither
occurs in nor refers to peasant ways of life.
Any work of interpretation includes elements of uncertainty and
intellectual self-effacement. For what truth is being displayed by
one's interpretation? Is it nothing more than a mediation between
the unfamiliar and the familiar? Assuredly, that is the more honest,
if less grandiose, practice of the interpreter,- yet, in confronting the
implications of this practice we discern that the interpretation of
the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar impugns the familiar itself.
The truth of interpretation lies in its intellectual structure of contrasts,
and its reality is inherently self-critical.
So, although this work focuses on the cultural reactions of peasants
to industrial capitalism and attempts to interpret those reactions,
it is, inevitably, also an esoteric attempt to critically illuminate
the ways by which those of us who are long accustomed to
capitalist culture have arrived at the point at which this familiarity
persuades us that our cultural form is not historical, not social, not
human, but natural—"thing-like" and physical. In other words, it is
an attempt forced upon us by confrontation with precapitalist cul-