Over the course of this class we have traveled the globe via a multitude of authors providing various accounts regarding particular types of beliefs and practices- i.e. witchcraft, sorcery, and spirit possession. Throughout, we have been confronted with the notion of the “Other” and its characteristics of backwardness, irrationality, and static tradition. However, readings like The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst a South American Peasantry, Islands of History, and Migration and Vodou have taken these claims and pushed back at the discourses of Western modernity and notions of “otherness”. In this essay I will first examine and then analyze the techniques in which authors Michael Taussig, Marshall Sahlins, and Karen Richman each illustrated the
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Using two different examples, that of the Devil Pact and the Baptism of Money, Taussig’s analysis focuses on and explores systems of exchange. In the former, previously self-sufficient farmers have now had their land taken over and are converted into landless wage laborers, providing labor for the colonial powers who took it. This process, in turn completely transforms the entire lifestyle of these newly proletarianized peasants. Their previous economy built on notions of gift, reciprocity and exchange were now being replaced by a capitalist economy based on the trade in commodities and dependence on actual money. In an effort to increase their productivity and in turn, their wages, male laborers on the sugar cane plantations made pacts with the devil. The money they earned from doing so was infertile money; it could not be used for practical purposes i.e. to buy land or pay their rent. If they did, that land would also be barren and not produce any crop until it is then exorcised, plowed, and replanted. The money could not be used to produce more money either. This money from the devil pact could only be used in the immediate to purchase luxury items like clothing, liquor, butter, etc. It is believed also that the man who makes this devil pact will die a painful premature death, but while living, the devil will control him. In this latter nefarious practice, monetary baptism, a peso bill is concealed by the god-parent-to-be during the baptism of a child, thus baptizing the money instead of the child, thus taking god 's blessing away from the child and placing the child’s soul in limbo or
Using two different examples, that of the Devil Pact and the Baptism of Money, Taussig’s analysis focuses on and explores systems of exchange. In the former, previously self-sufficient farmers have now had their land taken over and are converted into landless wage laborers, providing labor for the colonial powers who took it. This process, in turn completely transforms the entire lifestyle of these newly proletarianized peasants. Their previous economy built on notions of gift, reciprocity and exchange were now being replaced by a capitalist economy based on the trade in commodities and dependence on actual money. In an effort to increase their productivity and in turn, their wages, male laborers on the sugar cane plantations made pacts with the devil. The money they earned from doing so was infertile money; it could not be used for practical purposes i.e. to buy land or pay their rent. If they did, that land would also be barren and not produce any crop until it is then exorcised, plowed, and replanted. The money could not be used to produce more money either. This money from the devil pact could only be used in the immediate to purchase luxury items like clothing, liquor, butter, etc. It is believed also that the man who makes this devil pact will die a painful premature death, but while living, the devil will control him. In this latter nefarious practice, monetary baptism, a peso bill is concealed by the god-parent-to-be during the baptism of a child, thus baptizing the money instead of the child, thus taking god 's blessing away from the child and placing the child’s soul in limbo or