The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Oevil's Labor and the Baptism of Money

An Australian, trained at the London School of Economics, Michael Taussig is currently professor at Columbia University, New York. He engages in a wonderful dialogue with Marx, Weber, and even Aristotle in this piece, which shows how certain "magical" practices found among plantation workers in Colombia emerge not only in response to capitalist exploitation but serve as an enlightened moral critique of its consequences. This might be seen as a late phase of the rationality debates, in which the tables are turned such that the rationality of the West Comes under question from its victims and from the postcolonial world. Taussig argues that the plantation workers have an understanding of commodity fetishism akin to Marx. Commodity fetishism is a kind of inversion or transformation of totemism in which attention is placed on human products rather than natural species, but in which they are understood to have life, vitality, reproductive potential, and possibly even intentionality, while disguising the human labor entailed in their production. Taussig's approach has stimulated much discussion; lively criticism as well as comparative material on the imagination of money can be found in Parry and Bloch (1989a [1979); d. Burridge 1969) and De Boeck (1999), while the local critique of forms of accumulation has formed the basis for many anthropological accounts, often with respect to witchcraft This early essay was one of the first in a remarkable stream of work by Taussig that explores the creative responses to the often horrendous impact of Europeans on Latin America and that serves, as in this essay, also as a mirror for modernity. The argument