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

8 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
social relations in market society that has facilitated the insensitivity,
if not blindness, to this position, so that the scope and manner of
the mind's attention is explained only as physical or biological fact,
and not as social fact, as well. In other words, the social fact works
in our consciousness to deny itself and to be consumed in the physical
and biological.
In Franz Boas's anthropology we find further support for the concept
of culture that I wish to use. In highlighting one of Boas's early
papers, George W. Stocking, Jr., writes, that this paper "sees cultural
phenomena in terms of the imposition of conventional meaning on
the flux of experience. It sees them as historically conditioned and
transmitted by the learning process. It sees them as determinants of
our very perceptions of the external world" (1968 :159). But Boas's
conception is denuded of the tension that is imparted by the meaning
of modern history that conditions the learning process. It is not
just that our perception is historically conditioned, that the eye becomes
here an organ of history, that sensations are a form of activity
and not passive carbon copies of externals, but that the history that
informs this activity also informs our understanding of seeing and of
history itself. And the most forceful and cloying legacy of modern
history shaping our experience and therefore our conceptual tools is
undoubtedly the alienated relations of person to nature, of subjectivity
to its object, and the relations that are formed by social class,
by commodity production, and by market exchange. The abstractions
we bring to bear on any concrete phenomena will of necessity
reflect these alienated relations, but in being aware of this and its
implications and in raising it to our consciousness, we can choose
whether we will continue to disguise the categories unthinkingly as
manifestations of the natural or whether we will reveal them in all
their intensity as the evolving product of mutual human relations,
albeit concealed by their reified appearance in a society based on
commodity production.
The recognition of this choice is the first essential of the historically
sensitive dialectician, who must then proceed to work a way
out of the socially stamped validation of social facts as physical and
autonomous entities akin to immutable and natural things. Marx
struggles with this paradox in his analysis of the commodity as both
a thing and a social relation, from whence he derives his concept of
commodity fetishism as a critique of capitalist culture: the animate
appearance of commodities provides testimony to the thing-like appearance
of persons, appearances that dissolve once it is pointed out
that the definitions of man and of society are market inspired. Similarly,
Karl Polanyi berates the market mentality and the market