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

6 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
disguises social relations. The "natural" appearance of such things
has to be exposed as a social product that can itself determine reality;
thus, society may become master of its self-victimization.
In other words, rather than ask the standard anthropological question
Why do people in a foreign culture respond in the way they do
to, in this case, the development of capitalism? we must ask about
the reality associated with our society. For this is the question that
their fantastic reactions to our nonfantastic reality force upon us, if
only we have the wit to take heed. By turning the question this way
we allow the anthropologist's informants the privilege of explicating
and publicizing their own criticisms of the forces that are affecting
their society—forces which emanate from ours. By this one step
we free ourselves of the attitude that defines curious folk wisdom as
only fabulation or superstition. At the same time we become sensitive
to the superstitions and ideological character of our own culture's
central myths and categories, categories that grant meaning as
much to our intellectual products as to our everyday life. And it is
with the discomfort that such sensitivity breeds that we are forced
into awareness of the commonplace and of what we take as natural.
We are forced into casting aside the veil of naturalness that we have
laid as a pall over the process of social development, obscuring the
one feature that distinguishes it from the process of natural development,
the involvement of human consciousness. Thus, we are led to
challenge the normalcy given to our casting society in the realm of
nature. This is our praxis.
My motivation for writing stems both from the effects of four
years of fieldwork and involvement in southwestern Colombia in
the early 19705 and from my belief that the socially conditioned
translation of history and of the human quality of social relations
into facts of nature desensitizes society and robs it of all that is inherently
critical of its inner form. Yet this translation is ubiquitous
in modern society and nowhere more salient than in the "social sciences,"
in which the natural science model has itself become a natural
reflex, institutionally deployed as the guiding strategy for comprehending
social life, but which finally only petrifies it. My task,
therefore, is to impugn this deployment, to convey something of the
"feel" of social experience which the natural science paradigm
obscures, and in so doing to construct a criticism that is directed
against the petrification of social life by positivist doctrines, which I
see as uncritical reflections of society's disguised appearance.
Confronted with this modern mode of comprehension it is all too
easy to slip into other forms of idealism, and also into an uncritical
nostalgia for times past when human relations were not seen as ob-