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

io Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in
his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning" (1967, 1:75).
Artfully mediating the self-validating categories of their epoch,
the political economists gave voice and force to a symbolic system
in the guise of an economic analysis. The meaning of value, symbolized
by money, presupposed for them the universal and natural
validity of the signs and abstractions engendered by the market
mechanism. They presupposed a commoditized world and this presupposition
persists today as the natural way of viewing social life.
Conditioned by history and society, the human eye assumes its perceptions
to be real. It cannot, without great effort, contemplate its
perception as a movement of thought that ratifies the signs through
which history expresses itself. But to the critic who can stand outside
this mutually confirming system of signs the money form of
the world of the commodities is the sign that conceals the social relations
hidden in the abstractions that society takes to be natural
phenomena.
Because the cultures with which this book is concerned are not
market organized but market dominated, we are provided with an
opportunity to adopt this very same critical stance. Certain human
realities become clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system,
making it easier for us to brush aside the commoditized apprehension
of reality. Marx expressed this potential that lies within the
anthropologist's grasp as a source of great power for demotivating
the links of meaning that commodity production engendered in the
minds of its participants. "The whole mystery of commodities,"
he wrote in the famous chapter dealing with the fetishism of commodities,
wherein he assailed the principal categories of bourgeois
thought, "all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products
of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes
therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production."
With the aid of some of these "other forms of production" this
book therefore attempts to interpret capitalist forms of comprehension
of social reality. My strategy is to view certain fantastic and
magical reactions to our nonfantastic reality as part of a critique of
the modern mode of production. It would be a mistake to emphasize
the exotic quality of the reactions of these peasants if, by virtue of
such an emphasis, we overlook the similar beliefs and ethical condemnations
that characterized much economic thought in the history
of Western culture down to the end of the Middle Ages, if not
beyond. From Aristotle through the teachings of the early Christian
Fathers to the Schoolmen a similar hostility toward usury, profiteer-