This book attempts to interpret what are to us in 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...

In two widely separated areas of rural South America, as peasant cultivators become landless wage laborers, they invoke the devil as part of the process of maintaining or increasing production. However, as peasants working their own land according to their own customs they do not do this. It is only when they are proletarianized that the devil assumes such an importance, no matter how poor and needy these peasants may be and no matter how desirous they are of increasing production. Whereas the imagery of God or the fertility spirits of nature dominates the ethos of labor in the peasant...

Two generalizations are necessary to any discussion of black slave religion in Latin America. First, the whites were apprehensive of the superlatural powers of their subjects, and vice versa. Second, religion was inseparable from magic, and both permeated everyday life—agriculture, mining, economy, healing, marital affairs, and social relations in general. The Inquisition, for instance, regarded the occult arts that were drawn from the three continents not as idle fantasies but as the exercise of supernatural powers, including an explicit or implicit pact with the devil. The African slaves brought their mysteries and sorcery, the Indians their occult powers to...

The twentieth century ushered in a vast transformation that virtually broke the back of the peasant class. With the end to the devastating civil war, the war of One Thousand Days in 1902, the triumphant Conservative party was able to enforce a climate of “stability and progress,” establishing the security for foreign investment, which entered Colombia on a scale unequaled for any other Latin American country (Rippy, 1931:152). Much of this capital was invested in the Cauca Valley. President Reyes, a close friend of Santiago Eder’s, was in great need of funds to develop the valley where he himself had...

Of all work in the region, wage labor in the agribusinesses is held to be the most arduous and least desirable—even when the daily cash return is high. Above all, it is thehumiliation,the humbling authoritarianism, which agitates the workers, while the large landowners and their foremen complain of the workers’ intransigence and fear their sporadic violence.

Lower-class people feel that work has somehow become opposed to life. “On the coast we have food but no money,” mourn the immigrant workers from the Pacific coast. “Here we have money but no food.” Locals contrast work in the poverty-stricken...

Two secular images in the language of sorcery materialize its magical aura: sorcery is personmade, and it is “filth.” Although invisible powers forming an indistinct hierarchy led by the devil are prominent, the emphasis in sorcery is on the creative will of persons. Sorcery is themaleficio, the evil made, or it is, dramatically and simply, the “thing made,” thecosa hecha.It is not seen as fate or as an “accident of God.” The soul of sorcery lies in the poisoned breast of envy, and its dominating motif is filth.

Following Douglas’s interpretation (1966), ideas of filth and pollution...

According to the belief inel bautizo del billete(baptism of the bill) in the southern Cauca Valley, the godparent-to-be conceals a peso note in his or her hand during the baptism of the child by the Catholic priest. The peso bill is thus believed to be baptized instead of the child. When this now baptized bill enters into general monetary circulation, it is believed that the bill will continually return to its owner, with interest, enriching the owner and impoverishing the other parties to the deals transacted by the owner of the bill. The owner is now the godparent...

In the shafts of the tin mines in the mountains around the city of Oruro, Bolivia, the miners have statues representing the spirit who owns the mines and tin. Known as the devil or as the uncle (Tio), these icons may be as small as a hand or as large as a full-sized human. They hold the power of life and death over the mines and over the miners, who conduct rites of sacrifice and gift exchange to the spirit represented by the icons—the contemporary manifestation of the precolonial power of the mountain (Nash, 1976:27; Costas Arguedas, 1961, 2:303...

The mining rituals and the sculptures of the devil are forms of art. If we accept Marcuse’s suggestion that art fights the amnesia of reification by making the petrified world speak and sing against a repressive reality, then we begin to sense how and why the miners’ art is informed by their history extending back through peasant life to preconquest times. As art, these rites and statues dramatize and mold the meaning of the present in the hopes for liberation from it. Through ritual the spirits of nature are aligned with man and come to his aid. Proletarianization of peasants...

In contrast to the religion and folklore of Spanish imperialism there was no almighty spirit of evil in the Andean figuration of the spirit world. Evil was neither reified nor fetishized, neither a thing opposed to good nor a thing spiritualized like the devil. Instead, moral philosophy partook of an organic relational quality that reflected the epistemology of transitive social relationships, mutuality, and reciprocity. Yet, insofar as Spanish Catholicism and Andean nature worship blended, the spirit of evil could emerge in Andean symbolic life as the sum of the contradictions that consumed the Spaniards’ and the Indians’ understandings of one...

The Spanish conquest brought a spirit of evil to the Indians of the New World, initiating a proess of destruction which that spirit could syrniolize. Beyond that, the conquest also entered he iconography of nature. The landscape of symbols came to include the Indians’ experience of Spanish greed, mastery, and violence.

Harry Tschopik, Jr., relates that the Aymara of the Bolivian province of Chucuito believe that gold and silver are owned by an evil supernatural being who causes sickness and death; he is often seen as an old dwarf dressed as a Spanish soldier surrounded by his treasures. Given the...

Under the Incas, mining was a rather smallscale activity. It was run as a state monopoly and labor was provided by a rotating corvee, the aforementionedmita,which was not particularly burdensome to the miners (Rowe, 1957:52). John Leddy Phelan echoes the prevailing opinion when he says that mining was a minor economic activity because the Incas valued silver and gold only as a form of ornamentation and not as currency or as a depository of wealth (1967). The essential difference between preconquest and postconquest mining was that the former was a tiny part of a self-sufficient economy, whereas the...

To overlook individualism and conflict in Andean peasant life would be naive. Yet it would be even more erroneous not to emphasize the force exerted by reciprocity and communality. Peasant rites of production mediate the interplay of individuality with community, and in so doing they reflect the principle of inalienability in the constitution of rural life. Miners either come directly from this life or have a background in its dictates and sentiments. Yet the situation that they encounter in the mines is one predicated on alienation and the denial of reciprocity. Their rites of labor and of production reflect this...

Let us briefly review the salient contrasts between the magic of peasant production and that of mining. Peasants own their means of production, miners do not. Peasants control the organization of work; miners are in constant conflict with managers over job control and wage levels. Peasants combine production for subsistence with some sale of produce; miners are totally dependent on the labor market: the buying and selling of their labor power. Peasant rites associated with production and the means of production are sacrificial exchanges to the mountain spirits. These exchanges secure the right to use the land and ensure its...