production, exploitation and social consciousness in the "peripheral situation"

Berghahn Books

PRODUCTION, EXPLOITATION AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE "PERIPHERALSITUATION"Author(s): Terence TurnerSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 19(August 1986), pp. 91-115Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23170192 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 19, August 1986

PRODUCTION, EXPLOITATION AND SOCIAL

CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE "PERIPHERAL SITUATION"*

Terence Turner

I. Introduction:

A. Anthropology, Historical Materialism and the "Peripheral Situation"

The relationship between capitalism and those societies or systems of productive

relations, conceptually and spatially located on its "periphery" or internal margins, which

it has not completely penetrated or integrated, has emerged as the most active focus of

theoretical dialogue between anthropology and the other social sciences, including

history and historical materialism. Under the impact of this critical dialogue, earlier

anthropological approaches to the relation between contemporary capitalist and non

capitalist socities, such as "development" or Balandier's concept of the "colonial

situation" (Balandier 1955), have been rejected or transformed by a new organising

conception which might be termed the "peripheral situation". The two books under

review represent provocative contributions to this dialogue.

Perhaps the most salient feature of the "peripheral" focus has been the attempt to

synthesize some form of Marxian theory, emphasizing the exploitative nature of the

relation between the capitalist and (at least originally) non-capitalist components of the

situation, with an anthropological emphasis on the significance of the social and cultural

distinctness, relative autonomy or resistance of the non-capitalist society or ethnic

minority in the "peripheral" or marginal position. With this has gone a repudiation of the

anthropological tendency to treat such societies as self-contained entities, and a certain

impatience with traditional anthropological concerns with "culture", "meaning", and

non-economic dimensions of social organization such as kinship. In its more extreme

forms, this expresses itself in the attitude that "peripheral situations" are the only ones

worth studying, perhaps the only ones that exist, and that the theoretical models that have

been developed to handle their macro-economic aspects supersede, at least for most

important purposes, other anthropological methods and concerns.

Another way of putting the same point is Ernesto Laclau's assertion, in his foreword to

Chevalier's book, that the concern of both anthropologists and Marxists with the

"peripheral situation", forms part of a "crisis in . . . holistic conceptions of society"

(Chevalier 1982:vii). The interrelation in such situations of divergent patterns of

productive and exchange relations, associated with differing social and cultural patterns and identified with socially distinct groups, obviously raises the question of whether the

patterns of either group (or for that matter the global system of relations which they jointly

constitute) cafi be theoretically treated as 'totalities'.

To question whether such a system, or any of its constituent levels, can be conceived

as a 'totality' is to question whether it can be regarded as having a 'center', that is, a focus, and concomitantly, a 'structure' in any meaningful sense of the word. As Laclau remarks

further on, the concern "with the articulation of diverse social and economic formations",

(ibid.:ix), or in so many words with 'peripheral situations', has therefore become a major field for the development of 'post-structural' theories of various kinds, and has forced

'structural' approaches of both Marxist and structural-functional varieties to rethink and

refine their notions of structure.

This process of rethinking, from both Marxist and anthropological points of view, has

tended to focus around a debate over the significance of the social, cultural, and political economic differences between the 'central' and 'peripheral' systems involved in

'peripheral situations'. The key issue has usually been seen as whether the relatively

subordinate, peripheral system preserves some meaningful level or degree of autonomy in

relation to the dominant (capitalist) system, or conversely whether it should be seen as so

91



thoroughly incorporated into the latter that it can only be understood as an integral part of

a single, essentially homogenous system (viz. the capitalist world system). To what extent, in other words, are we dealing with the 'articulation' of interacting systems, each of which

retains enough resilience and coherence to exert constraining effects upon the other, or to

what extent are we simply bearing witness to local forms of 'dependency', i.e. penetration

by the universally prepotent, if internally contradictory "world system" of capitalism? These questions, however, limited and localized the terms in which they may be

couched in particular cases, have potentially far-reaching implications for the conception of capitalism itself. The essential point at issue is whether capitalism is after all to be

understood essentially as a structurally homogenous system of relations, a single world

system uniformly conforming to some more-or-less abstractly conceived model of the

capitalist mode of production, or rather as being (and perhaps always having been) an

essentially heterogenous assemblage of more- and less-capitalized sub-systems, in which

the development of the 'capitalist' sectors has been intrinsically dependent upon their

interaction with relatively unintegrated, non-capitalist forms of productive relations? Is

the 'peripheral situation' really so peripheral, in other words, or is it rather a central

feature of the historical development of capitalism? This set of questions, however, has

become the point of entry for another, more radical questioning or 'deconstruction' of the

concept of capitalism. If capitalism is to be understood as a 'decentered' assortment of

heterogeneous historical relations of exchange, then its putative focus in a specific relation of production may also be questioned, and possibly rejected. A focus presupposes a structure, and if the latter can be sufficiently deconstructed, according to certain 'post structuralist' agendas, then the focus can be made to dissolve.

The 'crisis of holistic conceptions of society' has thus taken form as a challenge both to

anthropology and to Marxism. The question is whether anthropology and historical

materialism will respond to it as allies or opponents. Michael Taussig's The Devil and

Commodity Fetishism and Jacques Chevalier's Civilization and the Stolen Gift make an

instructive comparison in this context. The two are comparable in several respects. Both

attempt to synthesize anthropological notions of economic, social and cultural forms with

Marxian or Marxian-derived concepts. Both are primarily concerned with the formations

and distortions of consciousness associated with capitalist relations of production and

class struggle. Both take as their empirical focus indigenous or 'peasant' communities of

Andean or sub-Andean South America. These points of convergence in empirical and

theoretical concerns, however, only serve to heighten the fundamental differences

between the two authors in respect of their general theoretical orientations, their

perspectives on the nature of 'dual economies' and 'peripheral' socio-cultural systems, and their treatment of the relation between the latter and political-economic factors.

B. Anthropology and Contemporary Western Marxism: Post-Althusserian and

Neo-Frankfurtian Approaches to 'Peripheral' Socio-Cultural Formations

Both authors approach the problems of the 'peripheral situation', including the full

range of issues set forth above, from the standpoint of neo-Marxian conceptual

apparatuses derived from opposite extremes of the tradition of 'Western Marxism'

(Anderson 1976). Their books are instructive, inter alia, as indications of the implications and difficulties of applying the different types of Western Marxist approach they exemplify to relatively similar sorts of anthropological data and problems. Both authors' theoretical

frameworks raise fundamental problems from the standpoints of both anthropological and Marxian analysis.

Taussig clearly derives from the concerns and methods of Frankfurt-school Marxism

(if figures like Brecht and Benjamin can be affiliated with that school for purposes of the

present comparison). These concerns might be defined as an overriding interest in forms

of consciousness and their deformation by capitalism, a preoccupation with cultural

patterns in abstraction from sociological or political-economic analysis of their contexts, and a tendency to forego systematic political-economic analysis altogether in favour of

binary typological constructs in which existing (capitalist and fascist) forms are directly contrasted to philosophically (i.e. ethically and/or aesthetically) conceived alternatives of

a more or less Utopian character. This capsule characterization of Frankfurt School

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Marxism should immediately be followed by noting that Taussig is an honourable

exception to the generalization about the avoidance of systematic political-economic

analysis, since he does provide a workmanlike account of the transformations of the

society and economy of his Cauca valley 'peasants' from the time of emancipation to the

present. It cannot be said, however, that this analysis is very tightly integrated with the

analysis of the fetishized forms of consciousness which follows, or indeed with the

characterization of peasant society as based on 'use-value' and 'reciprocity' which serves

as the effective socio-historical context for this analysis.

Chevalier, on the other hand, emerges from Althusserian 'structuralist' Marxism by

way of a 'post-structuralist' critique of that position, which occupies most of the first

chapter of his book. He rejects the a priori economistic reductionism which Althusser

sought to retain, at least as a philsophical premise, and calls for a more empirically open,

theoretically non-deterministic approach to the relations among the various 'instances'

(economic, political, spiritual, etc.) of the communities and social formations involved in

situations of interaction on the capitalist periphery. Chevalier nevertheless preserves

strong continuities with Althusser, and even in certain parts of his analysis, with his

programmatic economistic reductionism. He retains from the Althusserian canon the

notions of "instance" and "overdetermination" as the basis of his own theoretical

framework.

Chevalier himself cites Bourdieu (1977) as the source for his use of "overdeter

mination" (Chevalier 1982:16). Bourdieu's "indétermination" (1977:110-111) is, how

ever, itself transparently derived from Althusser 1971 (in spite of Bourdieu's lack of

citation). Chevalier, furthermore, employs the terms to refer primarily to overlapping relations between discrete "instances" or structures of the social formation (e.g. the

economy, kinship, relations, ideological and religious forms) defined along Althusserian

lines, rather than Bourdieu's much looser usage of it to denote the ability of conceptual

objects to enter into different "schemes" or "points of view". He also employs the corollary

concepts of "condensation" and "displacement" used by Althusser but not by Bourdieu, in

essentially Althusserian ways. In these respects his main theoretical framework retains a

strong Althusserian character, in spite of its overtly 'post-structuralist' formulation.

II. The Adventures of "Overdetermination"

A. Chevalier's Civilization and the Stolen Gift

Chevalier's book is primarly a study of a small rural mestizo town in the Inter-Andean zone of Eastern Peru. He is concerned with the relation of the economic organization, social institutions and cultural forms of this community, Puerto Inca, to the regional, national and international capitalist economy, on the one hand, and to the indigenous socio-cultural and subsistence production system of the local Campa Indians, on the other. This bald summary, however, gives little idea of the ambitious theoretical scope of

Chevalier's book. It attempts nothing less than a critical synthesis of world system dependency theory with the structuralist Marxist-articulationist approach, an integration of economic, sociological, and cultural levels of analysis within the framework of the

concept of action as "semiotic practice", a critique and mutual accommodation of Lévi Straussian structuralism, Althusserian Marxism, and Bourdieu's strategic interactionism, a global analysis of the continuities and differences between tribal Campa culture and

society and Western capitalist (and non-capitalist) practices and beliefs, and last but not

least, a reformulation of the basic nature of capitalism. The centerpiece of the book is the extended discussion of the relations between

subsistence-, simple commodity-, and overtly capitalist forms of production in Puerto Inca and its surrounding region. The focus of this discussion is on the complex and often indirect ways that the former two overtly non-capitalist modes of productive relations are subsumed within the dominant framework of capitalism. Chevalier gives a sophisticated analysis of the varying forms of exploitation through which local capital is able to exploit labour engaged in subsistence and simple commodity production, as well as the ways in which workers in these two sectors learn to calculate the value of their labour in

commoditized wage terms without directly putting it or its products up for exchange on

the market. He also gives a convincing account of the internal and external constraints on

93



the expansion and consolidation of local merchant- and productive capital. This analysis,

presented in chapter four, is a tour de force by any standard. As Chevalier claims, it has

implications not only for the analysis of other contemporary 'peripheral situations' but for

rethinking aspects of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Chevalier presents his complex analysis in alternating chapters on Campa and

Western forms of economic, social, and religious institutions, preceded by a long theoretical introduction and interspersed with extensive critical discussions of pertinent theoretical literature. Whether or not one agrees with Chevalier on particular points (and he covers so many that practically everyone will find something to disagree as well as to

agree with), one must salute his courage in attempting to address an imposing list of Big

Questions within an integral framework of theoretical argumentation and responsible

scholarship. These features ensure that many who disagree with Chevalier's formulations

will nevertheless find his book an invaluable reference for martialling their own counter

arguments. Anyone with the resolution to get through this book (and determination of a

high order is required to plough through the convoluted style and jargon of many of the

theoretical sections) will benefit from the effort.

B. The Indeterminacy of 'Overdetermination' and the Fetishism of 'Instances'

Chevalier's approach, as a specifically Althusser-oriented form of 'post-structur

alism', might be characterized as 'post-Althusserian'. Like other forms of post

structuralism, it perpetuates some of the basic features of the 'structuralist' position it

claims to supplant, suspended in a new formulation which in many ways represents a

further development in the same direction. In these respects, 'post-structuralism' consists

essentially of making virtues of the vices of structuralism. Chief among the latter is the lack

of an operative notion of structure.

This problem is central to Chevalier's analysis, where it takes the form of his attempt to use the concept of 'overdetermination', and the related problematic of 'instances', as his

basic theoretical framework. "Overdetermination", for both Althusser and Chevalier, is

defined in terms of relations between "instances" of the social formation (e.g. the

'economy', 'social relations', 'ideology', etc.). For both, the existence of these substantively identified sub-structures as analytically discrete 'instances', not only of capitalist society but all societies, is assumed on a priori grounds. From an empirical (anthropological)

point of view, however, the existence of such domains as discrete structures within any

given social formation is precisely what has to be demonstrated.

From a theoretical point of view, the a priori disarticulation of the totality into

externally related 'instances' invites two fundamental objections. Firstly, it begs the

question of the separateness of the posited 'instances', and secondly, it commits the

theorist to a mechanical, structural-functionalist conception of the relations between

them. One might note at this point that the concept of the social totality as a system of

external, structural-functional relations among separately pre-existing instances is the

antithesis of Marx's dialectical conception of the totality as a system of internally related

aspects of an integral process of social production and reproduction (Oilman 1976: Ch.3

and Appendices). For Marx, in other words, the totality precedes its diferentiation into

relatively discrete moments: for the Althusserian, the 'moments' seen as 'relatively autonomous instances', precede the totality. This view, the opposite of a genuinely structural approach, duly becomes the basis of 'post-structuralist' approaches like those of

Laclau and Chevalier.

The concept of 'overdetermination' is simply the expression of this failure to

understand the relations between the parts of a whole in structural terms, recast in the

mystified form of a positive theoretical concept. The function of 'overdetermination' and

analogous concepts (e.g. "structural causality", "relative autonomy", "articulation", etc.), in Althusser's ironically mislabelled 'structural' Marxism is to allow him to have his

'structuralist' cake of economic determinism ("in the last instance") and eat it too (as a

proponent, on pragmatic grounds, of effectively indeterminate, unstructured relations

between the 'economic instance' and other 'instances' of the social-cultural totality). It

constitutes, in other words, an essentially obscurantist argument that social and

ideological relations are too complexly determined to be determinate for practical

analytical purposes.

94



'Overdetermination', for Althusser, is in short an essentially a«£z-structural concept,

designed to save him from the practical analytical consequences of his philosophical determinism (or 'structuralism') by having to demonstrate it in an empirical analysis, while permitting him to remain an inflexible determinist in metaphysical (and political)

principle. That 'post-structuralists' like Laclau and Chevalier have seized upon this

obfuscatory concept as a positive cornerstone of their theoretical systems exemplifies the

transformation of structuralist vice into post-structuralist virtue to which I have referred.

The lack of any structural content, or indeed any definite content, in the concept of

'overdetermination' means that the whole burden of structural articulation, to the extent

that it is theoretically expressed at all, must be born by the definition of the instances

themselves. Here the Althusserian principle of determination in the last instance by the

economy is effectively substituted, for many analytical purposes, by the retention of its

corollary assumption, the definition of all "production" in terms of the 'economic

instance'. The significance of this point will appear more fully in the following discussion.

In his retention of the most conceptually "fuzzy" (his word: Chevalier 1982: 51)

category of Althusserian theory, while sacrificing its overtly Marxist and structuralist

formulation, viz. the concept of "mode of production" with its focus in the dominant

relation of exploitation, Chevalier exemplifies the post-Allthusserian move from global structural concepts like "mode of production" and "social formation" to a 'decentered'

concern with the 'discourse' of each "instance", seen as essentially discrete and "semi

autonomous", apart from whatever 'overdetermined' relations may be found to exist

between them and other 'instances'. The move away from structure is thus simultaneously a move away from Marx. The one 'structural' principle that survives is the (negative) semiotic principle of the arbitrariness of signs, misused as the basis of a claim for the

autonomy of ideological 'discourses' from their social contexts. Laclau, one of the

principle exponents of this move, sets out these basic ideas and assumptions of Chevalier's

analysis with admirable clarity in his preface to the book.

Chevalier is a diligent and intelligent practitioner of his chosen method, and his book

well exemplifies the theoretical and practical analytical implications of his approach. For

reasons which I trust I have made clear, however, it seems to me that the post-Althusserian move of severing the concept of 'overdetermination' from its moorings to Althusser's

anodyne structuralism, while retaining intact the essential constituents of Althusserian

'structure' (namely, the a priori array of 'instances'), is to wind up with the worst of both

worlds. It amounts to abandoning any specific conception (and certainly, any Marxist

conception) of the social-cultural totality, while preserving the mechanistic and crypto reductionist apsects of the Althusserian framework. The consequences of these

theoretical moves can be seen at all levels of Chevalier's analysis.

C. "Internal Relations" vs. External Theories

Chevalier's analysis dramatically exemplifies the central contradiction of post structuralism: the necessity of accounting for structures of social and cultural relations

with an anti-structural theory. A striking result of this contradiction is Chevalier's

oscillation between principled theoretical positions such as opposition to economistic

reductionism, commitment to an integral view of semiotic practice, etc. and their

antitheses at the level of his own analytical practice. This in turn gives the book its oddly ambiguous character as a theoretical argument unable to encompass its very considerable

strengths as an acutely observed and well presented ethnographic account, not to mention

its valuable scholarly reviews of relevant bodies of theoretical literature.

Chevalier's account of the complex relations among different modalities of

productive relations in Puerto Inca, of the economic effects of political, religious, and

historical factors, and the relations between mestizo society and the Campa communities

of the surrounding region, is in many respects an excellent job. Chevalier's performance in

marshalling these complex and heterogeneous relations into a concise descriptive

exposition displays analytical prowess of a high order. His theoretical interpretation of

this rich web of concrete relations, by contrast, often seems unable to grasp the

implications of his own descriptive account. These difficulties, as one would expect, are

particularly salient in treatments of the relations between what he takes to be distinct

95



'instances' of the social formation (or relatively distinct social formations in the case of the

mestizos and the bush Campa). The difficulties in question fall into two classes.

One type of problem shows up in dealing with what Chevalier takes to be

'overdetermined' relations involving the economic and other 'instances', where both

'instances' in question seem to participate in the same basic structural patterns. In such

cases, Chevalier finds himself compelled to resort to a mechanistic economic

reductionism of the kind he condemns in his introductory theoretical discussion. In

dealing with such cases of complex, multi-layered structural relations, one feels that the

very emptiness and indeterminacy of 'overdetermination', coupled with the external, mechanical conception of structural relations intrinsic to the notion of 'instances', leaves

Chevalier with no alternative to reductionistic determinism by the 'economic instance'.

'Overdetermination', in such cases, reveals its essential identity as a form of determinism.

The most striking example of this sort of problem is probably Chevalier's analysis of the

spatio-temporal form of the community of Puerto Inca in chapter six — "The Partitioning of Wealth and Space".

The opposite type of difficulty is represented by Chevalier's conception of religious or

ideological phenomena as an 'instance' unto itself, which is effectively unconditioned

(unoverdetermined? underdetermined?) by factors emanating from the economic (or any

other) 'instance'. The result is the opposite of the first problem: in the absence of

effectively determined relations with another 'instance', Chevalier has no clear idea of

how to formulate the relation between the internal structure of the phenomena in question and their relations with their social and political-economic context. This means that

religious forms as such end up being described as self-contained semiotic structures

'arbitrarily' related to (i.e. theoretically unarticulated with) their social contexts, other

than in terms of a posteriori functional effects. The alternative to 'overdetermined'

determinism, in other words, seems to be no structure at all. Chevalier's treatment of

Campa shamanism in the book's final chapter is the main example of this kind.

A closer examination of the two chapters I have just cited will serve to illustrate the

general points I have just made.

1. Spatial structure and economic determinism: false consciousness or "semiotic

practice"? Puerto Inca has a quadripartite barrio system of the pattern familiar in the

Andean highlands. This pattern is based on a correlation of dimensions of concentric

opposition and vertical polarity. There are two barrios classified as 'upper' and two classed

as 'lower'; in each pair, one barrio is relatively 'central', while the other is relatively

'peripheral'. The 'lower' pair of barrios collectively stand in a relatively 'peripheral

position to the 'upper' pair, as they lie along the river, which is contrasted as 'periphery' to

the 'central' inland forest. Finally the town as a whole is embedded within a tripartite series of concentric zones, constituted by the town center (the two 'central' barrios of the

'upper' and 'lower' pairs), a medial zone comprising the town periphery (the relatively

'peripheral' barrios of each pair), and the surrounding 'outside' zone, consisting of the

town's outlying hinterland and satellite communities. This pattern of oppositions is

recursively replicated at both higher and lower levels of contrast. The region as a whole

and its relation to other parts of Peru is seen in terms of the same set of contrasts, while on

the other hand each barrio is internally subdivided into correlated contrasts defined upon both concentric and vertical dimensions.

Chevalier notes that this pattern corresponds exactly to the traditional Andean

pattern of overlapping moieties and concentric oppositions, which has been documented

for pre-Hispanic Cuzco and many contemporary Andean communities. He further

acknowledges that the correspondence "is not entirely unexpected" given that the town

was founded and in considerable part populated by Andean migrants (Chevalier 1982:

221-222). He nevertheless asserts that neither the correspondence of pattern nor the fact

of heavy Andean migration . . . warrant a historicist explanation that would reduce such arrangements to

a mere reflection or prolongation of a Pre-Hispanic past into the social present of

a 'primitive-like' community, (ibid.: 222) The appearance of continuity with the Andean tradition must be rejected, he continues, for two primary reasons: firstly, concentric and bipolar orderings of space are found in

"many modern communities": secondly, . a faithful reconstruction of the structure and signficance of territorial

96



delimitations must go beyond the observation of formal properties only, and

requires systematic reference to other practices within the social whole,

political, economic, kinship and demographic; hence the necessity to reject those formalistic approaches that attempt to analyse spatial structures in

isolation from their multiple correlates, (ibid.: 222). In accord with this program, Chevalier declares that his analysis will

. . . reveal the determining presence, beneath a thin and deceptive layer of pre

Hispanic remains, of a wider mode of centralizing allocations: that is to say, the

concentric organization, in both synchronic and diachronic terms, of material

interchanges in the sphere of economic production proper (ibid.: 223). These passages are revealing of Chevalier's theoretical orientation in a number of

ways. The Althusserian terminology ('historicism') and even more the Althusserian tone

('determining presence . . . beneath a thin and deceptive layer of pre-Hispanic remains) are unmistakable. The dismissal of the formal spatial structure of Andean

communities, with all of its manifold and extensively documented functional connections

with virtually every major sphere of social life, as a matter of "formal properties only",

apparently on the grounds of its possession of a conventional symbolic form; the assertion

that this form, in spite of its continuing vitality after four hundred years of conquest and

alien rule, and its widespread occurrence in contemporary communities, where it

continues to organize many aspects of social, political and economic life, constitutes only a veneer of 'pre-Hispanic remains' without contemporary social or political-economic

signficance; and above all the representation of the theoretical alternatives as a choice

between a superficial, antiquarian formalism ('historicism') and a deeper understanding of

the "determining presence ... of the economic sphere", box Chevalier's theoretical

compass more accurately, and certainly more briefly and concisely, than the entire

programmatic theoretical discussion that takes up his introductory chapter. Chevalier proceeds on the assumption that to show that the spatial organization of

Puerto Inca corresponds to political-economic factors like class status, economic and

occupational standing, and ethnicity as correlated with all of the above, is tantamount to

showing that its apparent correspondence with the Andean socio-cultural pattern of

communal spatial organization is "deceptive", or at best a form of false consciousness. In

Chevalier's words, . . . this is not to say that the historicist account is a mere illusion . . . The

significance of historicism resides rather in its capacity to attenuate those

contradictions that are internal to the economic domain and the social whole by

reducing such conflictual relations to the temporary coexistence of diverging histories ... To put it differently, historicism is a transference of

contradictions, from the sphere of social confrontations to the realm of historical

fragmentation (ibid.: 237-238). It apparently never occurs to Chevalier that a symbolic structure, even though manifestly a

part of an overdetermined social-political-economic instance, could actually have a

functional role in regulating material political-economic and social processes. Since it is

clearly not just 'arbitrarily' related to the social phenomena which form its context, its only

possible alternative role in terms of Chevalier's theory of 'instances' is as a form of the

'ideological instance'. This means, in Althusserian terms, a form of false consciousness

that serves to deflect contradictions through one or another form of "transference" (i.e. 'overdetermination' in one of its complementary guises as "condensation" or

"displacement"). The Andean spatial pattern of community structure articulated through the forms of

vertical and concentric opposition, however, cannot be dismissed simply as a symbolic 'form' or a figment of the ideological 'instance'. It is rather a collective mechanism for

coordinating the social, political-economic and ritual processes which constitute the

'peripheral situation' in its traditional Andean form (that is, the relation between

indigenous or peasant society and the dominant imperial state, with its political and

ideological institutions of local control). The basic principle of the structure is the

correlation of the concentric relationship between dominant outsiders, who nevertheless

occupy the center of a local community space, and the local 'insiders' or autocthones who

occupy the periphery, and the vertical polarity between the dominant group, who owe

97



their 'higher' position to their role as the point of articulation between the community as a

whole and the next 'higher' level of the political-administrative hierarchy of the

encompassing state, and the subordinate autocthones or peasants, whose 'lower' position is a function of their encapsulation within the local community, cut off from direct contact

with 'higher' authority. This structure is recursively replicated at the level of the internal structure ol the

constituent kin groups or ayllus of the community, in which men, fathers, and elder

brothers stand in higher and more 'central' relations relative to women, sons, and younger

brothers, respectively. The whole complex pattern of relations thus articulated on

successive levels of family, ayllu, communal, regional, and state structure, is at once an

order of political, economic, class, ethnic, occupational, gender, and generational status,

not to mention ritual roles and cosmological identities. Chevalier misses all of these

dynamic, processual connotations of the structure as a whole, and specifically the

political-economic and social implications of its central correlation of vertical and

concentric contrast. He also fails to grasp the hierarchical implications of its recursive

character. Perhaps if he had not been so ready to write off the formal aspects of the

structure as of no practical significance he might have been led to appreciate their

substantive implications as the regulative forms of processes of social reproduction.

Once these implications are grasped, it is obvious that to demonstrate that one aspect

of the structure (its concentric dimension) actually has in a particular case some of the

political-economic correlates generally associated with it in other instances of the pattern

is not (as Chevalier asserts) tantamount to demonstrating that its formal resemblance to

the pan-Andean pattern is merely "deceptive"; nor is it to show that its formal properties

must therefore derive from local economic factors; nor yet is it to demonstrate, as

Chevalier claims, that the concentric dimension is more fundamental than, or prior to the

vertical (bipolar) dimension of the structure, with the latter serving simply as an

epiphenomenal version of the former. As Chevalier's own data on the historical

development of the four-barrio structure of Puerto Inca indicate, on the contrary, 'vertical'

and 'concentric' forms of contrast develop together as complementary aspects of relations

at all levels of the structure of Puerto Inca and its region: within barrios, between barrios,

between town and environs and between the local region and other parts of Peru. This

complementarity is intrinsic to the definition of the two dimensions as integral and

interdependent aspects of the domination of the local community and its constituent

processes of social production and reproduction by the encompassing political-economic

system of the capitalist state.

Once the complex functional dynamics and recursive structural properties ot Andean

communal organization begin to be understood, it can be seen that the structure does in

fact effect a 'transference' or 'displacement' of conflicts from one level of the structure to

another, although not in the way Chevalier suggests (whether the conflicts in question

really constitute 'contradictions' is another question). The replication of the opposition

between the community as a whole the encompassing state as the form of intra-communal

opposition between "barrios" and other segments enables the community to participate

vicariously, through ritual and other forms of inter-barrio activities, in the forms of its own

external domination, and even to act out its latent conflicts with the superordinate state in

the form of ritualized internal conflicts. The ritual battles (tinkuy) between the barrios,

moieties or parcialidades of Highland Andean communities are a good example of this. It

may be that the 'indigenous' fiesta put on by the poorest and most ethnically native of the

four barrios of Puerto Inca has a related function, analogous to the chuncho and yumbo

dances of other Andean communities (Chevalier 1982: 219, 224-225; Salomon 1981).

However this may be, the general point is that before one can speak of 'transference' of

conflicts (let alone the displacement of contradictions) in a structure, one must first take

the trouble to understand the social, political, and economic functions, as distinct from

determinants, of the structure in question. In contrast with the interpretation suggested here, Chevalier's economistic

reductionist account can offer no explanation for why the 'concentric' contrasts he

describes simultaneously assume the form of vertical polarities; nor can it account for why

the community should have taken the trouble to organize itself into formally distinct

'barrios' in the first place. The spatial structure of Puerto Inca is in fact a prototypical

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example of the integrataion of "practice and semeiosis" which Chevalier defines in his

introductory chapter as his prime theoretical goal. His analytical treatment of it, by contrast, may stand as a demonstration of the impossibility of 'thinking' (or even

recognizing) such an integration in either Althusserian or'post-Althusserian' terms. These

terms, on the contrary, ironically entail that Chevalier's attempt to understand the spatial structure of his community fails to "go beyond the observation of formal properties" of that

structure as such, to a deeper analysis of its relation to the "other practices within the social whole, political, economic, kinship, and demographic . . ." which it both represents and serves to regulate.

2. Theoretical relations between 'instances' as real social relations: shamanism and.

the 'relative autonomy' of the Campa. As I shall argue below, 'production' may have a

different content as well as merely a different relational form in different societies or social

sectors. Its social and cultural restriction to 'the economy' in capitalism may be unique, rather than the general case. The implication of this point is that those aspects of the social

totality which Althusserians and post-Althusserians define as distinct 'instances' (e.g.

religion or ideology) may in fact form integral parts of the process of production itself, or

be internally related to it in ways that remain unrecognizable from the standpoint of a

dogmatically economistic conception of production.

Campa shamanism is a case in point. Chevalier treats it as a self-contained system of

beliefs (i.e. a structure of 'arbitrary' symbols), governed by its own cultural premises and

logical principles: in short, as a pure ideological form, or an instance of the 'ideological instance'. This theoretical separation of shamanism as ideological 'instance' from

'overdetermination' by the economic instance assumes a crucial if extraneous role in

Chevalier's analysis. This role is to serve as the sole basis of the relative distinctness or

semi-autonomy of Campa society within the capitalist system of the Puerto Inca region.

Just as the ideological superstructure of shamanism cannot be reduced to an over determined epiphenomenon of the economic infrastructure, so (the argument runs) the

Campa cannot be reduced to a mere extension of the local capitalist system. This analysis seems at first sight to fulfill Chevalier's initial commitment to

reformulating the relation between infrastructure and superstructure in non-reductionist

terms, and at the same time to find a way of reasserting a measure of significant distinctness for the indigenous Campa society, after failing to find any basis for structurally

distinguishing it from the local capitalist system on economic grounds, and thus

reasserting the principle of articulation as a counterweight to the relatively unrelieved

dependentismo of the economic analysis. Unfortunately, both of these salutory results are

derived from nothing more than the treatment of shamanism on a priori definitional

grounds as a pure case of the 'ideological instance', which in turn is conceived by definition as insulated by the principle of the arbitrariness of symbols from the taint of

'overdetermination' (read: 'determination') by the economic 'instance'. Chevalier's

interpretation of shamanism and its crucial place in his overall model thus turn out upon closer examination to be themselves artifacts of his own arbitrary and unsupported theoretical assumptions. Not only do these not bear the analytical weight Chevalier

attempts to lay upon them, they obscure the vital connections between the shamanic

system and the social organization of the Campa which alone make the former

comprehensible. These may be briefly indicated with reference to the data Chevalier

presents. Campa shamanism as described by Chevalier (mostly on the basis of the work of Weiss

and others, since he himself did relatively little field work with Campa), is ostensibly based

on a set of beliefs about plant growth, life and death, and their complementary gender associated aspects. Plant species are thought to have a collective essence or soul (their life

principle), which is female. Individual plant-bodies, thought of as male, grow out of this

collective essence to constitute the outward, concrete form of the species. When the

individual plant-bodies become completely separated from their collective soul-essence

they die and are reabsorbed into the female spirit, which simultaneously gives rise to new

individual male bodies. The shaman (usually male) identifies himself with one of the

female plant spirits in order to be able to counteract the separation of his patients' souls

from their individual bodies. The shaman infuses the patient's body with the powers of a

female plant-soul, to enable it to reabsorb his or her individual ('male') soul, whose

separation from the body is thought to be the cause of the patient's sickness or death.

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It is, I suggest, relevant to this system of ideas that Campa society is based on a pattern of temporary uxorilocality or bride-service in which a man must separate himself from his

maternal household and become attached to his wife's domestic group; after a period he

usually attempts to move away, taking his wife to live either with his maternal family or in a

separate household. The separation of individual males from female-associated collective

groups and their reattachment to others, in other words, is the major feature, not only of

the Campa male life cycle but of the developmental cycle of the domestic group as a whole,

including its female members. Given that the extended family is for most purposes the

highest effective level of Campa social organization, this pattern of movement must be the

source and focus of the most chronic tensions and conflicts in Campa society. Campa shamanism could be said to be constituted as a fetishized projection of the basic Campa

pattern of social production (i.e. the global construction both of the individual person and

the key social unit) for the purpose of counteracting the de-construction of individual

persons (usually interpreted as arising in association with fissive tensions in the social

groups to which they are related) which is seen as the essence of disease.

Campa shamanism, in sum, is an attempt to reconstitute the elements of individual

social identity within the framework of the social process of production ofthat identity. Its

structure, efficacy and meaning are internally related to the organization of Campa social

production, interpreted not merely as an instance of the economic 'instance', i.e. as

swidden horticulture supplemented by hunting and gathering, but as the production and

reproduction of socialized individuals and family groups, of which process such

subsistence activities form an integral part. Campa shamanism, in sum, is relatively undetermined by the economic forms of capitalist production and it is a significant factor

in the structural distinctness of the Campa within the capitalist-dominated 'peripheral situation' of Puerto Inca; but it is both things primarily by virtue of its integral relations to

the Campa process of social production, with its fundamental differences in form and

content from capitalist commodity production, not by virtue of its 'arbitrary' disconnection from this process.

D. Production as "Economic Instance"

A third problem of the post-Althusserian approach, which it preserves from Althusse

rianism and its roots in Second- and Third International orthodoxy, is the conception of

production in all of its various structural modes and cultural forms as falling by definition

within the 'economic instance'. Although this assumption is hardly unique to the 'structu

ralist' and 'post-structuralist' 'instance'-'overdetermination' problematic, it nevertheless

represents perhaps its most fundamental presupposition. This assumption effectively forecloses the possibility of an empirically open, theoretically relevant comparative

anthropology of production. Marxian anthropologists would do better to start from Marx's and Engels'

programmatic 'anthropological' definition of production in The German Ideology, in

which production is said to comprehend, not merely the production of the means of

subsistence, but of human beings and families, social relations of cooperation, and new

needs as well. This global concept of production served Marx as the basis for his critical

conception of capitalist production as 'alienated', since commodity production narrows

the range of activities that count as productive to those that form part of the 'economy' (i.e. that produce Value), while separating the other forms of productive activity from

'production', and a fortiori from those considered to be producers. Rather than project this

alienated state of affairs as the universal definition of production in all societies (least of all

as Marx's concept of production), anthropologists would do well to consider that other

societies may overtly include some or all of the other moments of Marx's and Engels'

original formulation in their forms and conceptions of social production, while neither

considering subsistence production in 'economic' terms nor giving it the dominant role in

the total structure of productive relations.

This is not simply a question of definitions or abstract meta-theory. It has fundamental

practical implications for understanding the articulation of different modalities of

productive relations in peripheral situations. By constructing his book in the form of

parallel accounts of Campa and mestizo economy, kinship and social relations, and ritual

and religious practices and beliefs, Chevalier implies that Campa society is articulated into

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the same 'instances' as capitalist society, locally represented by the Peruvian mestizos.

More specifically, he argues that Campa production of the means of material subsistence is

articulated as an 'economic' sector, as distinct, for example, from family and kinship

relations, which form part of the distinct sociological 'instance'.

Against this I should argue that 'production' for the Campa constitutes a global

process in which the production of material subsistence is subsumed as a part of the same

process through which new social persons, and the family groups within which they are

socialized, are produced. There is, in other words, no separate 'economic instance' in

aboriginal Campa society. When the Campa come into contact with capitalism and learn

to calculate the value of the labour they invest in producing means of subsistence in

relation to its wage return on the capitalist labour market, in the manner Chevalier

suggests, this is still not necessarily tantamount to the integration of Campa production into capitalist production, because the Campa may still conceive their subsistence

production as an integral part of a more global process of social production within their

own society. This process, as I have suggested, differs from capitalist commodity production not

only in its relational structure, but in its qualitative content. The production of material

subsistence is obviously a part of it but this is not segregated into an autonomous

'economic' sphere. It is, rather, integrated with the other 'moments' of human and social

production as part of a global process of production of human producers and families. The

overall Campa conception of the relation between their own and the capitalist modalities

of labour thus doubtless involves weighing complementary aspects of social relations and

identity — those defined through the acquisition of commodities and those generated by

the traditional roles of global subsistence-person-family production within the Campa division of labour — rather than merely a simple calculation of the substitutability of

comparable quanta of 'socially necessary labour time' engaged in different forms of the

qualitatively identical activity {viz. 'economic' production). The general point I am trying to make is that the complexity of political-economic and

socio-cultural relations on the 'periphery', and specifically the incomplete integration between the dominant capitalist society or world system and the subordinate pre- or non

capitalist society comprising the peripheral situation, has to be understood not simply in

terms of the incomplete integration of two systems of economic production, but of the

incommensurability of different ways of defining and articulating production itself. To

conceive of the basic problem in terms of the articulation or absorption of different

modalities of a homogenous economic 'instance' is to assume what has to be proved, and I

suggest that it is usually to assume wrongly. What is taken for granted at the outset is

precisely what is most at stake in the struggle of Third and Fourth world peoples to resist

becoming absorbed into capitalism to the extent that they lose the ability to define

themselves in their own way, which means in pragmatic terms to reproduce their own

forms of production.

E. Structural Indeterminacy within the "Economic Instance";

or, Deconstructing Capitalism (in theory)

1.Unity of production or inarticulate articulation? Chevalier's analysis of the

relations among capitalist-, simple commodity- and subsistence production is conceived

as a treatment of economic relations within the framework of the economic 'instance'. As

other 'instances' do not enter the picture, it dispenses with the concept of 'overdetermin

ation'; instead Chevalier deploys a sophisticated combination of Marxist and neo

classical marginalist concepts for the internal analysis of the system of economic relations

as he defines it. Within this eclectic framework he produces an acute and compelling

analysis of the ways in which non-commoditized subsistence production and non

capitalized forms of simple commodity production may become subsumed within the

calculus of capitalist commodity production, even in the absence of the exchange of their

products on the capitalist commodity market. He also shows convincingly how merchant

capitalist entrepreneurs are able to control native labourers without owning or controlling their means of production, simply by dominating the terms of trade for commoditized

necessities and extracting a surplus from native labour through the overpricing of their

wares.

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Chevalier argues that the peasant producer in a 'peripheral situation' like that of

Puerto Inca learns to calculate the value of the labour time he/she invests in subsistence or

petty commodity production as if it were wage labour by virtue of the fact that he/she

knows that it could be sold for a wage, and thereby earn a known level of commodity return. The critical claim is that labour in the non-wage and even non-commodity

producing sectors becomes conceptually valorized in wage terms as a result of the

availability of wage labour as an alternative. His argument for the essential continuity of

subsistence and simple commodity production with capitalist wage-employment is thus

based upon a subjective analysis of the peasant producer as marginalist calculator.

Chevalier concludes from this marginalist analysis that there is no basis for conceiving

simple commodity production or even subsistence food production as constituting distinct 'modes of production', 'articulated' as 'semi-autonomous' systems of productive relations to the dominant capitalist sector, notwithstanding his recognition that the

capitalist sector lacks the resources to employ more than a fraction of the population at

any one time. Chevalier, moreover, lays considerable stress on the importance of the local

peasants' ability to rely on freely available agricultural land for subsistence production as

an effective check on the power of capital to subsume them into a fully capitalized wage

economy. Although this retention of an alternative sphere of subsistence or simple

commodity production makes possible a degree of independence, on an individual basis, from wage relations in the dominant capitalist sector, Chevalier argues that for structural

purposes these sectors must be counted as integral parts of the same (capitalist) system of

productive relations. By the same token, while the existence of a subsistence economy

gives rise to a relatively anarchic, marginal zone of social and economic freedom within

that system, Chevalier does not treat it as constituting the basis of a distinct social

community or level of social relations.

Given Chevalier's assumption that productive relations, regardless of their social

form or cultural content, must be seen as forming part of a substantively homogeneous economic 'instance', and his subjective marginalist criterion of structural continuity within that instance, it is difficult to imagine what could constitute grounds for

recognizing some set of productive relations as a structurally distinct 'mode' or sub

system, once it becomes articulated in the subjective calculus of producers as an

alternative to wage labour in the sense described. The point is significant as an indication

of the degree to which Chevalier's analytic synthesis of the post-Althusserian discourse of

'instances' and the neo-classical discourse of marginal utility renders irrelevant any consideration of the structure of the systems of productive relations involved. The

homogeneity of the instance and the unity of the subjective matrix of decisions as to the

marginal utility of different forms of labour combine to eliminate any theoretical vantage

point from which to define structurally significant discontinuities in a complex system of

productive and exchange relations such as Chevalier describes.

It thus becomes impossible for Chevalier to articulate 'articulation'. This is why, in spite of his commitment at the beginning of the book to avoid the excesses of the world-system and dependency models in favour of an anthropologically sensitized articulationist

approach, Chevalier winds up adopting what amounts to an extreme world-system view in

which all forms of production are subsumed within the one capitalist system, defined

essentially as a continuum of marginal utility decisions and relations of exchange. 2. Exploitation as 'ambiguous dénégation' in class discourse: the withering away of

Marx? In his introductory chapter, Chevalier does not flinch from stating the general view

of the nature of capitalism that is "integral to the logic of my research" (Chevalier 1982:

10). This can be summed up in three claims: first, that "capitalist exploitation [is to be

understood as] an ambiguous object of divergent "denegatory" practices" (ibid.: 10);

second, "that the 'law of value' is the constant object of class struggle, not its invariant

cause" (ibid.: 10); and third, that

. . . the logic of capitalism is typified not so much by the 'objective' valorization of monetized labour power, as by the generalized commodification

of material factors of production . . . (Chevalier ibid:. 10) In other words, the terms in which the law of value applies to labour are to be seen as a

matter of conflicting ideological discourses of the working and capitalist classes, not of a

critical theoretical analysis of the structure of capitalism as such. It follows that the special

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nature of the commodity — labour — as valorized in the form of labour power, but utilized

in the form of concrete labour (which is the basis of the Marxian analysis of surplus value

and thus of the essence of capitalism as such) is to be dissolved in an essentially neo

classical vision of "generalized commodification".

Here Chevalier formulates, with admirable directness, the essential implications, not

only of his own analysis but of the post-structuralist, post-Althusserian position he shares

with Laclau and others. The questions that must be asked of this .claim are whether the

data and analysis presented in the book really support such a conclusion, or whether it is

rather to be seen as an artifact of his initial theoretical assumptions. A critical examination

of Chevalier's argument indicates an answer of 'no' to the former and 'yes' to the latter.

One of the many problems with 'overdetermination' is that it is essentially conceived

as a mechanism of consciousness (originally, by Freud, as an aspect of the dream-work). When applied to the theorization of political-economic and social relations, it tends to

become substituted for the sociological relations in question. This is not to deny that the

latter have their conscious aspects, nor that they constitute, inter alia, forms of

consciousness. It is to maintain, however, that the structures of political-economic and

social relations are distinct from, and not reducible to, the forms of consciousness of those

relations, and must be analyzed with concepts specifically adapted to their properties. This problem arises in compelling fashion in the form of Chevalier's claim that the

Marxist concept of exploitation and the neo-classical concept of profit as a direct return

on capital are merely complementary forms of 'overdetermination' (viz. 'displacement' and 'condensation', respectively) of the class struggle over the terms of the exchange between labour and capital. Chevalier proposes this interpretation in a revealing discussion in which he begins by rejecting Marxian value theory and its basic premise that

labour is the source of surplus, and proceeds to declare that he finds the Marxian and neo

classical notions of exploitation to be essentially 'transformations' of each other, which

must be understood as 'expressions' of the 'positions' of labour and capital respectively

(Chevalier 1982:142-47). From a Marxist standpoint, the result is to undermine the most

fundamental structural relation of all, namely exploitation conceived as a relation of

production, rather than simply an imbalance in the terms of exchange. This formulation, however, cannot be accepted either on its own grounds or as a

characterization of Chevalier's real position. Firstly, the sense in which Chevalier can

claim that he accepts the Marxian concept of exploitation as 'equally' valid, or indeed valid

at any level, is not evident, given that he rejects not only the value theory but the principle that labour is the source of surplus. Secondly, it is not accurate to speak of a neo-classical

notion of 'exploitation' as a 'transformation' of the Marxian notion denoted by the same

term. Neo-classical economics has no notion of exploitation in this sense, and certainly no

category that could be regarded as a 'transformation' of the Marxian concept. To speak of

the Marxist and neo-classical notions of exploitation merely as 'equally valid' discourses

appropriate to different class 'positions' is in effect to deny any validity to the notion of

exploitation at all. Thirdly, it is obvious that Chevalier does not in fact remain neutral

between the Marxist and neo-classical positions as he defines them, since he rejects the

theoretical basis of the Marxist position, then adopts the terms of the neo-classical

position without submitting them to a similar critique, and finally in effect casts his own

analysis in a marginalist neo-classical form.

This neo-classical neutralization of the notion of exploitation does not prevent Chevalier from constructing a powerful and original account of exploitation at the level of concrete description. We here encounter another prime example of what I have referred to

above as the ambiguity of Chevalier's analysis, which often seems to set at cross-purposes its general theoretical framework ('instances' and 'overdetermination') and its analytical accounts of specific sets of concrete relations.

Chevalier's analysis of exploitative relations between capital and labour in Puerto

Inca in fact makes important contributions to a Marxist understanding of the sui generis forms of capitalist relations that arise in the 'peripheral situation'. He reports that in

Puerto Inca the surplus product of peasant subsistence- and petty commodity producers is

expropriated by a capitalist class of petty merchants, who are also the main employers of

wage labour engaged in agricultural cash crop production. He argues that the capitalists do not rely on ownership of the means of production (agricultural land is so plentiful as to

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constitute in effect a free good and tools are so simple as to represent a negligible expense), but instead extract the surplus in the sphere of exchange in the form of an imbalance in the

terms of trade for essential commodities. Their effective monopoly over access to these

goods and to markets for the products of the peasants allows the merchants to charge exorbitant prices for the former in relation to the low prices they offer for the latter in their

role as middlemen between the peasants and the relatively distant and inaccessible

markets for the products. In spite of its apparent circumvention of the Marxian principle that capitalist

exploitation rests upon control of the means of production by the exploiting capitalist, this

sort of case is not in fact an exception to the Marxist analysis of exploitation (still less an

instance of a 'neo-classical model of exploitation' based on exchange), but, on the

contrary, is a simple, if somewhat indirect, instance of it. Control of the means of

production is crucial in Marx's analysis of European capitalism because under European conditions it was essential to compel workers to sell their labour power for a price (the

wage) below the value of the product of their concrete labour.

The essential point, however, is not the control of means of production per se, but the

ability to compel workers to exchange the products of their labour for less than the cost of

reproducing their labour power. This is what the monopolistic merchant-employers of

Puerto Inca achieve through their double monopoly over the supply of the goods

necessary to renew labour power and access to the market for the products of concrete

labour. They do not have to own important means of production (or pay wages) since they are able directly to monopolize access to goods that have become accepted by the workers

as essential to the renewal of their labour power. The essential principle of the relationship remains the ability of the exploiter to enforce a discrepancy between the cost of labour

power and the product of labour through the control of key resources essential to the

renewal of production in general and labour power in particular. This is the essence of the

Marxian concept of exploitation and it has no counterpart in neo-classical theory. The fundamental point here is that exploitation, in the Marxist sense of the term, is not

merely a figment of false consciousness or class-interested ideological discourse, not just 'one way of seeing' the reality of the peripheral situation of Puerto Inca and its environs, but the real focus of the situation as a whole, which can be shown, with the empirical and

analytical tools which Chevalier himself provides, to underlie both the capitalist and

labour perspectives on the situation.

III. The Uses of Fetishism

A. Taussig's The Devil ana Commodity Fetishism

Taussig, like Chevalier, offers a comparative study of two peripheral societies,

although in his case they do not constitute parts of a single regional system. They are the

black ex-slave subsistence agriculturalists of the Cauca Valley of Colombia and the

indigenous peasants and mineworkers of Highland Bolivia. For the former, Taussig relies

on his own extensive field research in the area; for the latter, he relies on others'

ethnography (mostly that of June Nash). The focus of the comparison is the beliefs of both

groups in 'the devil' (although the extent to which the same 'devil' is involved seems

questionable) and the ways in which they constitute a critique of capitalist commodity

forms of exchange and wage relations.

Taussig's theoretical framework centers on Marx's concept of the 'fetishism of

commodities'. He constructs a binary typology, in which capitalist society, charac

terized by commodity exchange, production for 'exchange value', and positivist, non

relational thought, is contrasted with pre-capitalist societies based on reciprocal

exchange, 'use-value' production and 'relational thinking'. The devil mediates between

these two types of society as they jointly constitute a 'peripheral situation'. He is the 'pre

capitalist' society's collective representation of the aspects of capitalist relations of labour

and exchange most antithetical to its own norms and values. Even though himself a fetish, he is thus nevertheless a critical fetish; that is, he serves to articulate a pre-capitalist

critique of capitalist forms of fetishism, as epitomized by the commodity form.

This cursory outline of Taussig's argument will suffice to indicate some of the major

problems of his interpretation as well as some of its interest and originality. Apart from

anything else, the book makes a valuable contribution in placing the question of fetishism

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squarely in the center of the theoretical agenda of the anthropological interpretation of

symbolic forms. Taussig also deserves credit for setting this question firmly in the context

of political-economic relations of production, exploitation and exchange, and for

correctly identifying the structural focus of fetishized forms as the mediation of different

levels or sub-systems of productive relations.

B. Anthropological Virtues and Vices

1. Fetishism, ritual symbols, ana critical consciousness. The mam idea of Taussig's book is that the beliefs and ritual practices with which pre-capitalist societies in a

peripheral, dependent relation to capitalism attempt to articulate their relations with it

can be read as a critique of capitalism, which consciously formulates as 'unnatural' and

evil key aspects of capitalist relations which are represented as 'natural' by capitalist forms

of fetishism. The pre-capitalist beliefs (e.g. in the devil or the baptism of money) are also

fetishized, but because they retain a consciousness of the organic connection of producers to their products they are less radically alienated than capitalist forms of fetishism, in

which this connection is suppressed. In this sense, the former are able to serve as an

implicit critique of the latter.

Taussig's focus on cultural forms of mediation between the capitalist and 'pre

capitalist' sectors of 'peripheral situations', and more particularly his emphasis on the

critical content embedded within the fetishistic form of such beliefs, sets his contribution

apart from most other recent work on the relation of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of

production. The idea of focusing on the terms in which dependent non-capitalist groups or

strata articulate their own relations with the local capitalist sector is salutary, given the

difficulty and confusion that has attended so many attempts to articulate 'articulation' on

economic grounds alone.

It is also salutary to find the Marxian concept of fetishism introduced as the central

principle of an analysis of symbolic beliefs and ritual practices. As I have argued

elsewhere, it is high time that the hegemony of 'symbolic anthropology' and structuralism

in the analysis of cultural forms should be challenged by analyses that can restore to our

understanding of such forms their character as alienated consciousness, and their

connection with social relations of production and reproduction (Turner 1986). From this

point of view, Taussig's book represents a praiseworthy effort in the direction of

dealienating the anthropology of culture.

Taussig's approach to his subject is exemplary in another important respect, namely the seriousness with which he takes native social thought as a source of critical insights into our own social situation, specifically our own social theory. The anthropological

analysis of non-Western, non-capitalist conceptions of society, it may be suggested, will

have arrived at a level of insight commensurate with its subject at the point when it moves

beyond its primitive notions of representation and classification and begins to learn theory from the indigenous theories which it seeks to interpret. Taussig's attitude to the native

social ideas he sets himself to analyze is humble and respectful in these terms. He treats

native systems of thought as the equals of academic social theory in critical insight and

theoretical power, and argues that we can gain critical insight into our own system by

taking the troúble to understand their conception of it. In this he sets an example that one

wishes were more frequently followed.

2. Ideal type as Idealist ideal: or, 'pre-capitalist' society as romantic inversion of

capitalism. These general strengths, unfortunately, are not well realized in the specifics of

Taussig's analysis. To begin with, the theoretical framework he constructs for his analysis of 'pre-capitalist' fetish beliefs, a contrast between two ideal types representing 'capitalist' and 'pre-capitalist' 'modes of production', does not stand scrutiny, either from an

anthropological or a Marxian point of view. Taussig defines the ideal type of 'capitalism' for this purpose in terms of production for exchange value, non-reciprocal commodity

exchange, and reified, positivist forms of thinking (typified by the fetishism of

commodities, which obscures the relation between producer and product): whereas the

ideal type of 'pre-capitalist' society is defined by production for 'use-value', reciprocity

(typified by Maussian gift exchange), and relational forms of thinking based on the

principle of analogy (embodied in milder forms of fetishism which emphasize the organic connection between producer and product).

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The 'pre-capitalist' type thus defined seems to include all non-capitalist societies, from Ancient Greece through indigenous tribes and peasant subsistence cultivators to the

Inca Empire and its present-day descendants. It corresponds, in other words, to no actual

'society' or 'culture' in the anthropological sense of the term, and embraces societies of

radically different modes of production, social organisation, and culture. Its only basis of

unity, in fact, is its conception as an idealized negation of capitalism, and its only positive

properties are negative counterparts of capitalist ones. It bears little resemblance to either

of the actual 'pre-capitalist' societies with which Taussig is directly concerned. Perhaps most seriously, it conveys no sense of a systematic (let alone a dialectical) relationship between the social relations and forms of consciousness to which it refers. As a methodo

logical tool for investigating the relationship of forms of consciousness to their social

contexts in the two empirical cases Taussig analyzes, it serves as little more than a means of

projecting Taussig's assumptions onto the data.

C. Marxist Terminology and Marxian Theory

1. 'Capitalism' and 'mode of production'. Taussig's definitions and uses of the terms

'capitalism' and 'mode of production' omit what in Marx's thought is taken to be the

critical feature of both, namely the specific relation of exploitation whereby the surplus

product is extracted from labour. Taussig's 'modes of production' are really defined as

modes of exchange. In an inversion of Marx's procedure, the apparent forms of circulation

are treated as the fundamental theoretical constituents of both capitalist and 'pre

capitalist' 'modes', rather than, as Marx considered them, outward forms of the underlying content of productive relations. The point would be relevant in any case, but is especially so in this one, since Taussig presents his analysis in overtly Marxist terms.

2. Capitalist value-form categories and non-capitalist production. Another problem from the Marxist standpoint is Taussig's use of Marxian value-form terminology, in

particular his designation of non-commodity subsistence forms of production as 'use

value' production. Marx defined the category of 'use-value' in complementary opposition to that of 'exchange-value', as a feature of the commodity in its fully capitalist form, in

which the moment of exchange is fully separated from the moment of production, and the

utility of the product for its consumer, which appears as the form of the value of the

commodity in the context of exchange, is thus separated from the real content of its

exchange value (namely the labour time invested in its production). The utility of products assumes different forms in non-commodity production (and even simple- or pre-capitalist

commodity production). While Marx himself was not entirely consistent on this point, I

suggest that the term 'use-value' should not be applied to these forms, especially to those in

which the category of exchange-value is absent.

'Use-value' is not, in other words, a universal concept of "utility" like that of neo

classical economics (Chevalier also makes this point: Chevalier 1982: 417). This is not

merely a question of terminological nit-picking. The value categories in terms of which the

production of non-capitalist societies is oriented typically comprise what from a capitalist

point of view seem like composite constructs, in which 'use' and 'exchange' or social

circulation are not differentiated as they are in their capitalist counterparts. Such

'composite' forms of value, furthermore, are not restricted to what in capitalism would be

considered 'economic' production, but in many cases apply directly to the 'production' of

social persons (Turner n.d.). To use the capitalist value-form categories for non-capitalist forms of production, in other words, is to imply that their differences from capitalist

production can nevertheless be formulated in capitalist terms, and thereby to obscure the

more fundamental differences in the form and content of production itself, both as social

activity and cultural construct, that separate them from capitalism. Such differences are

fundamental to any analysis (such as Taussig's) of 'peripheral situations' in which

capitalist and non- or partly-capitalist systems interact.

3. Exploitation in non-capitalist modes of production. Another problem with

Taussig's characterization of 'pre-capitalist' societies as 'use-value'-producing societies is

that it implicitly ignores the important extent to which social production in even simple

tribal societies is actually carried out 'for' others, in relations of production with an

exploitative component. By the time we reach societies like Ancient Greece — one of

Taussig's main examples — such exploitative production accounts for a huge proportion of

10b



total production. Taussig mentions at various points, but makes nothing of, the occurrence

of exploitation and its attendant conflicts within the two 'pre-capitalist' societies with

which he is directly concerned in the book. This omission has serious consequences for his

analysis, as 1 shall argue below.

4. 'Pre-capitalist'? 'Non-capitalist'? Or just capitalist? There is also the obvious

point that the two 'pre-capitalist' societies which Taussig treats are not 'pre-capitalist'. The

society of the Cauca Valley peasants may be said to have assumed something like its

present form at the time of emancipation, that is, as a concomitant of the conversion of the

Cauca Valley from slave-agriculture to capitalist agriculture. Far from being in any sense

'pre-capitalist', in short, it came into being as a function of the establishment of a capitalst

regime. It seems, moreover, to have been dependent from the outset upon the capitalist sector for both wage-labour income and commodity trade. The Andean miners and

peasants constitute a more complex case, but the mines have existed as mercantile or state

capitalist enterprises since the Conquest, and for all of that time they have coexisted in

interdependence with the subsistence agricultural sector. The latter can thus scarcely be

thought of as "pre-capitalist", in spite of its preservation of certain pre-capitalist forms.

The point is not to quibble over terms, but to get at the real differences between the

fully capitalized and the dependent sectors of 'peripheral situations', which the

inappropriate terms only serve to obscure. Taussig is certainly right that the subsistence

cultivators of the Cauca Valley and the Bolivian Andes are not (qua subsistence

cultivators) fully and directly integrated into capitalist relations of production. It is

nevertheless true that their social forms of production, family, and community relations

have been organized to accommodate the partial and indirect forms through which they are integrated into, and dependent upon, capitalism. They are not 'pre-capitalist', but not

in any full or straightforward sense 'capitalist' either. How to define this complex relation

of partial integration and partial separation is, of course, one of the central issues in the

debate over the nature of 'peripheral situations'.

At the opposite extreme from Taussig, Chevalier,-as we have seen, claims that from the

point at which a worker in the subsistence sector becomes able to calculate the relative

value of his or her labour or simple commodity product in terms of its potential value on

the capitalist labour or commodity market, that simple commodity or subsistence sector

has in effect become capitalist. This, as I have argued, is to throw out the structural baby with the cultural-realist bathwater, i.e. to ignore the question of whether the subsistence

sector possesses exploitative relations of its own, which serve as an alternative structural

focus of productive and reproductive activity to their capitalist counterparts. It also fails to

give proper weight to two factors of which Chevalier gives an excellent descriptive

account, but which he grants no structural significance. The first of these is the role of

subsistence production in preventing the full integration of labour into the capitalist

sector, thus limiting the scope of capitalist exploitation. The second is the signficance of

the internal problems or weakness of the local extension of capitalism, which may themselves prevent full penetration of the regional system of production.

Finally there is the point, which I introduced in the discussion of Chevalier and to

which I will return below, of the differing social content of 'production' itself, which may serve to set a¡5art what we have been accustomed to call 'subsistence' production from

capitalism in qualitative, as well as in structural and quantitative terms. It seems to me that

these four factors in combination should enable us to speak of relatively 'non-capitalist' sectors of production that are nonetheless interdependent with, and formulated in

relation to, capitalist sectors of the same total system or 'situation', without trying to

conceive of them, on idealized formal grounds, as 'pre-capitalist' after the manner of

Taussig. 5. The fetishism of fetishism? Finally, Taussig's use of the concept of fetishism itself

is problematic in several respects. For Marx, the 'fetishized' aspects of commodities are to

be accounted for as aspects of the structure of capitalist production. They arise directly and continually from the process of capitalist commodity production itself. The nub of the

matter is that commodity production in its capitalist form presupposes the separation of

the producer (and the process of production as a whole) from the exchange of the product. Since the value-form under which the commodity appears in exchange is that of use-value,

the illusion is fostered that the exchange value of the commodity is determined by its use

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value. The value of labour as a commodity is therefore seen in terms of the exchange of the

wage for the use-value of labour (its concrete product) rather than of the exchange value of

labour-power, as determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it.

The separation of the conscious form which the commodity assumes in the context of

exchange from the consciousness of its production is thus conceived by Marx as an

integral aspect of the material separation of production and exchange in the capitalist

organization of production. The same holds true for the concomitant separation (i.e.

alienation) of the producer's consciousness of his or her subjective contribution to the

product from the conscious form in which the product is concretely integrated, through

exchange, into the totality of social production. For Taussig, on the contrary, the properties of the fetish arises simply from habitual

association with the commodity as a form of exchange, . . . those of us who are long accustomed to capitalist culture have arrived at

the point at which this familiarity persuades us that our cultural form is not

historical, not social, not human, but natural — "thing-like" and physical (Taussig

1980a: 3; my italics). It is not, in other words, the social process of production in its capitalist form that

gives rise to the fetishized consciousness of the commodity, but the commodity itself in its

form as a mystified 'exchange value', which imposes this form through "long . . .

familiarity"; in short, by a sort of protracted reflectionism, Taussig's severance of the

problem of the generation of the form of consciousness from its social context in the

process of production thus results in his investing the commodity with the intrinsic power to generate consciousness; in other words, in his fetishizing the commodity, Taussig's

conception of fetishism thus ironically becomes a sort of fetishism of fetishism. In this it

follows faithfully the lead of its Frankfurt School models, which pioneered in the

severance of the Marxian analysis of forms of consciousness from their context in the

social organization of production. From a Marxian point of view, this is the direct

corollary of redefining 'mode of production' in terms of the form of exchange rather than

the central relation of exploitation in production.

D. The Devil and the Baptism of Money: Fetishized Critiques of Capitalism or Uncritical Representations of Deviation From Accepted Levels of

Relations Between Capitalism and the Subsistence Sector?

1. Critique of normal practice or uncritical abnormal practice?7he heart of Taussig's book is his analysis of the beliefs of the peasants of the Cauca Valley in the contract of

agricultural workers with the devil and the magical perversion of compadrazgo into a

relation to money. He also gives an extended discussion of the beliefs of Bolivian peasants and tin miners in a devil-like figure, who seems only superficially similar to the Cauca

peasant devil. Taussig's interpretation of the Bolivian data raises many problems from the

standpoint of Andean ethnography which I have no space to go into here, and in any case

the basic points of the Bolivian analysis are essentially the same as those of the Cauca

analysis, so that most of my general criticisms of the latter apply to the former as well. I will

therefore attempt no extended discussion of the Bolivian case here.

Reduced to its simplest terms, Taussig's argument is that two bizarre ritual practices —

the devil contract and the baptism of money —

embody the Cauca Valley peasants'

representations of capitalist commodity relations. In the former, a (male) worker in the

capitalist sector of commercial agriculture makes a bargain with the devil to increase his

productivity (and thus his piece-wages) by magical means, involving no greater outlay of

work on his part. The money thus earned is said to be "barren". It must be spent on

personal consumption of an impermanent character (e.g. clothes or drink). It cannot be

used to buy land, for such land would not yield crops, nor can it be applied to family

expenses. In return for his ill-gotten gains, the worker becomes controlled by the devil, and

wastes away to an early death.

The other practice in question is the baptism of banknotes. A compadre assisting at the

baptism of his godchild palms a one-peso bill so that it becomes baptized instead of the

child. The note becomes in a sense the godchild of the compadre, while the unbaptized child is secretly condemned to purgatory. The note receives the child's name, and when

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called upon by this name and the right magical formula, and put into circulation, will

always return to its compadre bringing with it more money, which it steals from its proper owners.

Taussig interprets the devil contract and the baptism of money as critical represen tations of the nature of capitalist commodity relations by 'pre-capitalist' peasants, who are

not yet 'accustomed' to them to the point where they have come to see them as 'natural', that is, as fetishized in the capitalist sense. This interpretation is based on the proposition that these practices and their associated beliefs are intended as representations of

capitalist relations of production and exchange as such, that is, of the essential forms and

general principles which normally govern those relations. The fact that the beliefs and

practices in question are overtly formulated as extraordinary, perverted forms of normal

monetary or wage transactions, or more precisely as ways of circumventing normal,

capitalist relations and procedures by decidedly non-capitalist means, does not in

Taussig's view vitiate this claim because in his interpretation they amount to counterparts, formulated in 'pre-capitalist' terms, of the unnatural and perverse aspects of normal

capitalist relations.

2 .The baptism of money: critique of capitalism or mystified social banditry? Taussig's

interpretation nevertheless clearly depends upon the interpretation of the "unnatural"

ritualized relations in question as representations of normal capitalist relations, or at any rate the essential principles of those relations. Taussig's argument for this interpretation,

surprisingly enough, turns out to be based on Aristotle. Taussig adopts Aristotle's logic, with its basis in analogical syllogism, as the expression of the essential principles of social

consciousness in 'pre-capitalist" societies based on 'natural' or 'use-value' economies. He

sees it, as such, as corresponding to the mode of thought of all simple tribal or peasant societies based on subsistence production (in spite of its provenience from a highly stratified slave society with a strongly developed proto-capitalist mercantile sector). On

the basis of this surprising claim, Taussig presents an analysis of the beliefs underlying the

baptism of money as a series of interlocking Aristotelian syllogisms (Taussig 1980a: 127

32). This analysis is not presented as an account of native beliefs in their own terms, but

rather as a substitute for it. The result seems to me to distort the cultural sense of beliefs in

question in several fundamental respects.

Taussig begins by contrasting the ordinary capitalist fetishized belief in the 'natural'

ability of money, as capital, to reproduce and increase itself (as in Marx's formula, M-C

M*1 ) with the Cauca peasants' belief, as manifested in the rite of the baptism of money, that

for money to do this is unnatural (in fact, supernatural): . . . it is clearly understood that the money would not do this on its own. The

multiplication of money as capital is not seen as a power inherent in money.

Thus, it is not commodity fetishism, since these people do not consider it to be a

natural property of money to reproduce . . . (ibid.: 128-29). The key question is that of the referents of the two sets of beliefs: specifically, does the

baptism of money refer to 'money as capital' at all? Taussig presents no evidence in

support of this interpretation, but seems simply to assume that money invariably functions

as (or is seen as) capital in capitalism. This, however, is not the case. Many monetary transactions in capitalism, for instance those of workers, continue to be formulated in

terms of money's relatively non-specific 'pre-capitalist' role as a medium of acquisition of

commodities for consumption (as in Marx's formula: C-M-C). In the baptism of money, it

is signficant that the banknote in question is made to act as a sort of bandit-accomplice by

stealing money from those entering into simply commodity transactions with the

banknote's owner. It strains credulity to claim that this is actually a critical insight into the nature of capitalist surplus value. It seems rather to represent a non-capitalist alternative

to the specifically capitalist use of money to increase itself through the relation of capital, an alternative overtly seen as 'unnatural' in relation to the ordinary workings of the

system, which themselves by implication continue to be seen as 'natural'.

Such a belief, in other words, is fully compatible with an acceptance of conventional

capitalist fetishistic ideas about the reproductive powers of money as capital, or indeed of

commodities as factors of production: e.g. of concrete labour as producing the wage, or

land as producing rent, etc. As it happens, Taussig offers indirect evidence that the Cauca

peasants accept such notions in the form of the belief that the wage-money acquired

through the devil contract is "barren" (e.g. if invested in land, the land will not produce a

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crop). The idea of investing money in land is probably as close as the Cauca peasants ever

come on their own behalf to a notion of money as capital. The implication of the belief

in the "barrenness" of the money of the devil contract is that other, normal money is

'fertile', i.e. (re-)productive in the sense in question! (cf. Taussig 1980a: 94).

Taussig's Aristotelian model of analogical reason, in sum, serves primarily as the basis

of his own analogy between the simple commodity money involved in the baptism of

banknotes and money as capital. This analogy seems, on the face of it, to be false, yet it is

basic to his argument that the 'pre-capitalist fetishism' of the Cauca peasants is in fact a

critique of capitalist relations and their fetishized forms. This sort of problem is endemic to

Taussig's attempt to substitute ideal-typical and analogical constructs for anthropological

analyses of the cultural beliefs or productive relations of the people in question in their

own terms. Instead, bits of ethnography are simply inserted into the ideal typical construct

as required. The result is that Taussig places virtually no constraints on his interpretation of the data, and his conclusions for the most part seem simply to be projections of his initial

assumptions. Since these are formulated as more or less Utopian inversions of capitalist

relations, the picture of 'non-capitalist' society that emerges remains couched in

essentially capitalist terms and categories. To adapt another well-known phrase: it's

magnificent, but it's not anthropology.

3. The relation between capitalist and non-capitalist sectors as the focus of fetish

beliefs. Both the devil contract and the baptism of money, considered on their own terms,

seem essentially to represent perversions of relations in the monetized or capitalist sphere which result in violations of norms of reciprocity and social interdependence in the

subsistence sector (above all, in the sphere of family, kinship, and spiritual kinship

relations). These violations are in both cases represented as the corollaries of the

enrichment of the individual perpetrator to a degree that sets him apart from his family and

communal relations, thus actively disrupting and undermining them.

The beliefs in question thus appear to be essentially representations of the dangers and

temptations of capitalism as seen from the standpoint of its potential disequilibrating effects upon social relations in the non-capitalist sector. More specifically, they express the threat of individualistic success in the capitalist sector to the essentially egalitarian,

reciprocal relations among kinfolk and peers in the peasant community. In this

connection, it is important that the perpetrators are assumed to be peasants of the 'pre

capitalist' sector (Taussig nowhere presents evidence that normal capitalist relations are

held to have such consequences, nor does he give any systematic data on the peasants' ideas about capitalism, or for that matter of social relations in their communities). The

perverse, supernatural distortions of the capitalist relations in question, on the contrary, are expressions of the signficance of unusual success in the capitalist sphere and the anti

social implications of the resulting inequality. All of this, it goes without saying, is a very different thing from a critique of capitalism

per se, and certainly from an insight into the principles of commodity fetishism. The

principle involved could perhaps be seen as the opposite of Foster's notion of 'limited

good': a principle of'limited bad', as it were (cf. Foster 1965). It is not that weal this seen as

fixed, and its acquisition as a zero-sum game, in which one man's gain is another's loss, but

precisely that it is seen as variable, while the maintenance of family and communal

relations depend upon constraining the variations within relatively narrow limits. From

this point of view, the baptism of money and the devil contract take their places beside

other South American peasant beliefs such as the "panema" complex described by Wagley and Galvao and analyzed by DaMatta and myself (Wagley 1957; Galvao 1951; DaMatta

1967; Turner 1970). Panema is a spirit believed in by backwoodsmen in the Brazilian

Amazon which punishes too great a success in hunting with misfortune for the hunter. The

effect is to even out the size of hunting bags, thus avoiding disruptive inequalities in the

control over a valued resource.

4. Giving the devil his due. The devil, in his role as agricultural labour-contractor,

seems to me to be a case of the same type. Taussig's interpretation of the meaning of the

devil rests upon two propositions, both of which seem to me to be problematic. In the first

place, Taussig treats the devil as a representation of capitalist relations in and of

themselves. In the second place, he interprets Him as a representation of Evil (that is, in

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this context, of the destructive, anti-human, "unnatural" aspects of capitalism). Neither of

these interpretations seems to me to be born out by a close examination of the data,

supported by some knowledge of the ethnographic context. The devil, as He functions in

the devil contract, as well as in the 'devil' beliefs of the Andean peasants and miners,

appears rather to represent aspects of the relationship of the capitalist sector to the

peasant or worker of the subsistence sector. In other words, as Taussig himself puts it, the

devil is a mediator between the capitalist and non-capitalist sectors, not an aspect of

capitalism in and of itself.

The relationship He represents is the ambivalent one of utter powerlessness and

subordination as an ordinary worker within the capitalist system, on the one hand, and

the dream of gaining a measure of power over that system, by some extraordinary means, on the other. These are obviously merely opposite sides of the same coin. All across

Lowland South America in 'peasant' areas like that of the Cauca or Northeastern Brazil, one encounters the use of the devil as a metaphor for the overwhelming, alien power of

capitalist production relations, seen as Other in relation to the subsistence sphere of

peasant life. A good example is given in Leite Lopes' O Vapor do Diabo (translatable as

The Steam of the Devil) about workers' attitudes toward employment in sugar mills in the

Brazilian Northeast (Leite Lopes 1978:65; on this point see also Gross 1983: 699). The

converse, represented by Taussig's case of the devil contract, is the idea of the devil as the

vehicle of the powerless worker's attainment of some form of power over capitalist conditions of employment and remuneration. This is simply to invert the relation of

powerlessness, while leaving unchanged the basic notion of the power of the capitalist

system itself. The implicit presumption is that for the worker to exercise signficant power within the system is as alien and extraordinary in terms of the system itself as that system, in its ordinary workings, is alien to, and all-powerful over him.

In neither of these capacities does the devil represent 'Evil', still less a critique of the

intrinsic evil of capitalist relations in and of themselves. The devil represents power, and

power has its price: a powerless worker has nothing to pay with but himself and his

relations to the ordinary world of his powerlessness. Gaining power through the devil is

therefore at the expense of either or both of these. The 'evil', however, is less in the devil

than in the worker who makes the bargain, knowing its consequences, in the first place. In

this respect, as in that of power itself, the devil is essentially an alienated projection of the

worker's ambivalent relation to the capitalist system on which he depends, but which

exploits him and reduces him to powerlessness. The devil, as such, is a fetish, but not a

critical fetish in the sense that Taussig wants to give Him. He embodies no critique of

capitalist forms of wage labour or commodity exchange in their own right, but rather the

uncritical ambivalence of exploited workers who dream of higher wages for less work.

(For a similar critique of Taussig's interpretation of the Bolivian 'devil', see Piatt 1983:62

69). 5. The devil and baptized money as fetishes. The devil and the baptized banknote,

then, are undoubtedly fetishes of sorts, but the question from the Marxian point of view is, in what process of social production do they arise, and how can they be understood as

embodying a mystified separation of production and exchange relations?

The social context of these beliefs is a complex 'peripheral situation' in which a

subordinate sector of subsistence production, primarily organized on the basis of family,

kinship, and compadrazgo relations, and identified as the prototypically female sphere, interacts with a dominant sector of commercial agriculture, prototypically identified as

the male sphere of migrant wage-labour. The two spheres of productive relations are

separate both in spatial and structural terms, and their relative separateness is

strengthened by the 'peasant' sector's possession of an independent support base of

subsistence agriculture (which is, however, unable to supply all the necessities of life:

dependence on the capitalist commodity sector is inescapable). Males, in their roles as

migrant wage labourers and earners of monetary income, are the material mediators of the

two domains.

It is important to consider that from the point of view of the subsistence sector, the

capitalist sphere appears as a distinct sphere of exchange rather than as one of production

per se. The production that goes on within it produces nothing directly for the subsistence

sector. From the perspective of the latter it is rather the sphere in which the labour power

Ill



of its adult male members is exchanged for a money wage. Within fairly narrow limits the

claims of the two spheres on the commitments of the male workers can be reconciled, but

too heavy a commitment to wage-labour in the capitalist sector, or to participation in the

money economy, is incompatible with men's commitments and relations to the

subsistence sector, in at least two respects. Firstly, it leads men to shirk their obligations to

their wives and children, both in terms of monetary support and co-residence as members

of the family household. Secondly, it is disruptive of the essentially egalitarian relations

among members of the wider peasant community, because of the inequalities of personal wealth and consumption which it makes possible. There is also the point, stressed by

Taussig, that continuous work as an agricultural labourer in the commercial sector is so

physically draining that it leads to premature aging, infirmity, and early death.

The salient particulars of the devil contract and the baptism of money should be

recalled in this context. One might well begin with the facts that the devil is male and that

only male wage-labourers in the commercial agricultural sector are thought to make

contracts with him. The money cannot be used for any 'productive' function, that is, any of

the normal expenses of the subsistence sector. This means, above all, the support of the

worker's family, and thus the social reproduction of the subsistence sector itself. This is

why it is unthinkable for a woman to engage in a devil contract, since she could not use the

proceeds to raise her children.

The individualistic, egoistic uses to which alone the money can be put are moreover

those most likely to disrupt the egalitarian, reciprocal basis of communal social relations.

The proto-type of such relations is spiritual kinship, and here the belief in the baptism of

money stresses how attachment to the sphere of monetary exchange, if carried too far, contradicts the relations of sacred social kinship in the specific sense of preventing their

reproduction, since the principal victim is the child who is deprived of baptism, and thus

prevented from becoming part of the spiritualized sphere of communal society (for this

interpretation of compadrazgo, see especially Bloch and Guggenheim 1983). The sphere of monetized exchange associated with the capitalist sector (or rather,

participation in it beyond a relatively limited level of intensity and success) is thus seen as a

threat to the subsistence sector, in its capacity as a sphere of production of social persons and families, and specifically to the ability of that sector to reproduce its forms of

production. The main condition of existence of this threat is the relative separateness of

the two spheres and the mutual incompatibility of participation in or commitments to each

from the other's point of view beyond certain limits. The devil contract and the baptism of

money represent the overly successful participation of a male mediating figure in the

sphere of monetized exchange, from the point of view of the subsistence sector, as an alien,

disruptive force which renders the latter's reproduction impossible. The baptized banknote and the devil, as Taussig says, are mediators between the two

sectors of production, but they are only fetishized, fantastic forms of the real mediators, who are real men. It is these men's subjective acts in and attachments to the dominant but

separate and alien, capitalist sphere of exchange, which come to appear as alien, inhuman

forces from the vantage point of the sphere of subsistence production from which they are

separated (alienated). The separation of the two sectors as systems of production of two

different kinds, capitalist commodity production and the production of human actors and

families, respectively, and the assumption by the former of the character of an

independent sphere of exchange in relation to the latter, thus becomes the material basis of

the separation in social consciousness of the subjective acts and relations of human

producers from themselves, and their projection in the alienated form of supernatural

fetish-beings. A relation between objective social spheres of productive activity (i.e. between objective 'things') is endowed with the fantastic form of human social agency, and

human subjects are thereby deprived of their social character and powers as agents. It is vital to bear in mind that what is at issue for both Cauca peasants and Andean

miners is not merely the reproduction of their own sphere of production for its own sake

but the relations of exploitation intrinsic to the forms of production within that sphere. The fetishized forms of the relation between the productive sectors involved in a

'peripheral situation', as formulated by the subordinate sector, in other words, cannot be

taken simply as the representations of idyllically unexploitative systems of "natural"

production, but must rather be seen as products of specific social forms of exploitation.

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These relations of exploitation in systems of social production like that of the Cauca Valley

peasants are essentially those involved in what Marx and Engels called 'the slavery of the

family', meaning the exploitation of women by men.

Here, as in the relation between subsistence and capitalist sectors as wholes, the

exploited may feel that they have as much at stake as the exploiter in maintaining the

relation of exploitation within certain acceptable limits (those fetishized as 'natural'). The

alternatives may be far worse, as in the case of Cauca Valley peasant women abandoned by their migrant-labourer husbands or mates and left with the whole burden of child-care and

the maintenance of the domestic group. It is above all from the perspective of those most

exploited within the subordinate sector and, by the same token, those who carry the chief

burden of its reproduction, that the possibility of their supporters' leaving them for the

blandishments of the capitalist sector must appear truly satanic.

The fetishism of the devil and the baptized banknote, in sum, has its roots in the

structure of social production, not merely in the form of exchange. This is not a

fetishization of capitalist relations of production per se, however, but rather of the

relationship between the subsistence and capitalist systems of productive relations, in

which workers seem to become transformed, through 'unnatural' levels of participation in

the latter, into the opposites of their normative roles as (re-)producers in the former: in

effect, into anti-producers who disrupt the reproduction of the subsistence sector's

relations of family and communal production and thereby stretch the forms of

exploitation inherent in these relations to the breaking point. The subjective attachments and activities of these (male) workers, in other words, only

assume the fetishized form of devils and magically animated banknotes in what is

perceived as their 'unnatural' mode of too great attachment to, or success in, the capitalist sector. Such levels of attachment and success, as I argued in the previous section, are seen

as implying 'unnatural' levels of power over the capitalist sector. For a powerless

representative of the subsistence sector such a degree of power is in itself so alien to the

normal form of the relationship between the two spheres as to assume a supernatural form.

The conception of an unusually high level of involvement, success, and power in the

capitalist sector of monetized exchange as 'unnatural', at the same time, implies that lower

levels (i.e. those consistent with the reproduction of customary forms of productive relations within the subsistence sector) are 'natural', and as such consistent with what

Taussig refers to as 'natural' economy. It is important to recognize that this notion of the

'naturalness' of certain levels or forms of economic relations (Taussig's as well as the

peasants' is just as 'fetishized' in the Marxian sense of the term as the 'unnatural' forms

represented by the more dramatic fetishes of the devil and the magical peso note. In both

cases, a relationship between two systems of productive relations, which is the product of

the subjective actions of social beings, is alienated in consciousness to the status of an

objective product of asocial powers ('natural' or 'supernatural', as the case may be). 6. The devil and baptized money as critique: capitalist relations of production from

the standpoint of the principle of 'limited bad'. The question remains of whether this

reinterpretation of the character of the devil and the baptized banknote as fetishes

supports Taussig's most interesting claim, namely that they can be said in some sense to

constitute a critique of capitalism. Taking the Marx-Engels definition of production cited

above as a global process involving the production of social persons, families, and

communal relations of cooperation as well as means of subsistence as a standard, this

question can be answered in the affirmative.

Let us assume that the 'subsistence production' (Taussig's 'use-value' production) of

the Cauca Valley peasants does in fact constitute such a global, undifferentiated process of

human and social production. The devil contract and the baptism of money, I have

suggested, can be seen as assertions that capitalist commodity production, beyond certain

narrow limits, is incompatible with the reproduction of such a totalizing process of human

production, and in particular with those aspects of it in which the human individual and

social relations constitute the primary goals of productive activity. This does represen a

critical perspective of a kind, even if it is framed from the standpoint of a particular society rather than a general vision of the essential nature of human production per se, and even if

it is couched in the qualified terms of the 'principle of limited bad' rather than a direct

critique of capitalist relations in and of themselves.

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IV. Conclusion

With this last point I pick up again one of the main themes of my discussion of

Chevalier. It is essential that anthropological analyses of situations of interaction between

different 'modes', sectors or levels of production should free themselves from the narrowly economistic conception of production, at least to the extent necessary to take account of

the other aspects of productive activity stressed by Marx and Engels. The struggle for

control over production does not begin and end with material subsistence, nor can

commodity production in its developed, capitalist form be equated with material

subsistence as a manifestation of the same 'economic' moment of productive activity. The

other moments of production are also vitally involved, and nowhere does this appear more

clearly than in those clashes of differently organized systems of social production that

constitute 'peripheral situations'.

To reject a narrow economism, however, by no means entails rejecting the structural

framework of Marx's analysis of capitalist production as a useful model for the analysis of

peripheral situations of interaction between capitalism and non-capitalist systems of

productive relations. On the contrary, since Marx's analysis is not 'economistic' in this

sense, as has been argued at various points in this discussion. The challenge is rather to

integrate the other moments of production recognized by Marx and Engels in their

programmatic statements within the terms of Marx's mature model of social production,

making due allowance for the differences between capitalist and non-capitalist forms of

production. A major part of this task is the conceptualization of forms of value and

exploitation proper to non-capitalist, non-exclusively 'economic' forms of social

production (Turner n.d.). Another major part of the task, I would urge, lies in integrating that other much-neglected aspect of Marx's structural analysis of total systems of social

production, namely reproduction. The struggle between the capitalist and non-capitalist constituents of "peripheral

situations" is fought out, I suggest, above all at the level of the forms of reproduction, for it

is control over these, or the ability to defend them, that enables the maintenance of an

autonomous sphere of production. Control of production, of course, is not maintained

simply for its own sake, but for the sake of controlling some exploitative relation of

production that serves as the focus of the productive and reproductive process, or else for

the sake of preserving a shelter from another exploitative relation in a system of

production not under the control of the social group in question. The conception of 'production', then, must be coupled to a far greater degree than has

usually been the case either in Marxist or anthropological analyses, with an emphasis on

the importance of reproduction, in its Marxian sense as the production of the social forms

and forces of production. The point is particularly relevant to the analysis of 'peripheral situations'. Reproducing its forms and processes of production is the manner in which a

society pragmatically defines them, and thereby defines itself. It follows that a society's forms of reproduction are the pragmatic instruments through which it defines the

boundary between itself and another society, or another level or sector of a "peripheral situation". This is why the process of reproduction becomes the focus of conflict,

resistance, accommodation, and fetishization in such situations.

Another important aspect of Marx's notion of the structure of systems of social

production, as Taussig's emphasis on the concept of fetishism may serve to remind us, is

that it is as much concerned with what we would call cultural forms of social

consciousness as it is with political-economic relations per se. For Marx, forms of social

consciousness (or 'culture') and the organization of social production and reproduction must be understood in integral relation to each other, i.e. neither as arbitrarily distinct

'instances' nor as reductionist 'reflections'. In this and other respects, Marx remains a

better (and more anthropologically sophisticated) guide to the problems of 'peripheral situations' than most Marxists (or anthropologists). The prime example of this, and the

focal element in Marx's concept of the cultural dimension of production, is his analysis of

'fetishized' forms.

Such forms, Marx's analysis suggests, will be found to mark points of significant structural articulation, whether between different units of production, between levels of

production and reproduction, or between different sub-systems of production as wholes.

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As points of articulation, fetishes constitute points 01 separation between spheres ot

material relations, which also become points of separation in consciousness between the

subjective and objective components associated with those spheres. The analysis of

fetishized forms of consciousness becomes in these terms one of the most powerful tools

for understanding the structures of 'peripheral situations'.

NOTES

s'Many of the ideas that went into this paper were presented to my seminar on 'History, Myth and

Ethnohistory', at the University of Chicago, Spring 1986.1 am greatly indebted to the members of the

seminar for the vigorous discussion the received. Mr. Fernando Coronil and Prof. Irene Silverblatt

were present as guests and made valuable comments. I, of course, assume full responsibility for the

final form of what are, in many cases, collective ideas.

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production, exploitation and social consciousness in the "peripheral situation"

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