Michael T. Taussig - The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Thirty years after its first publication in 1980 seems like a good time to add a sort of afterword to this devil book so as to ponder the nature of anthropology as storytelling and bring you up to date with some changes in the situation described in the first half of the book.

But my first interest is with voice and the art of writingthat which is the very lifeblood of our work yet rarely gets mentioned. As I see it, our work in anthropology, as much as in philosophy, is a species of poetry, a matter of finding the words and rhythm of language that resonate with what we are writing about. To put it crudely: anthropology studies culture, but in the process makes culture as well. To be aware of this is to figure out ways of translating between the known and the unknown without taking away the strangeness of the unknown and, even more important, without blinding oneself and one's readers to the strangeness of the known, that which we take for granted about ourselves and our ingrained ways of lifesuch as the very idea of the market economy thrown into bold relief by the devil contract exemplified in this book.

Founded on this as its basic principle, however, the devil book now seems to me to have fallen short in its own mode of storytelling. Instead it is written in a clear, dry, analytic prose that distances itself from its subject matter with the omniscient voice of authority, one of the tricks one quickly learns to adopt in academic writing. Of course to deviate from this is to run the considerable risk of losing readers, for they too are habituated to this trick as the language of truth.

Nevertheless, having stumbled into the concept of commodity fetishismwhich, if I am not mistaken, was then unknown in the English-speaking world or at least in its social sciencesit was helpful to spell out that concept in a step-by-step analytic manner. In those days I was probably too unsure of myself to do it any other way, especially given that I was dealing with such strange material (meaning the concept of commodity fetishism and the devil contract).

To bring the fetish into Marxism and into the economic history of what was then called the Third World, was at one stroke to challenge economic reductionism and to bring in culture and religion as forces in their own right. This was what revolution in the Third World meant to me, the idea of Che Guevara that the revolution could be made without waiting for the objective conditions to reach maturity. The subsequent mythology of Che was in itself evidence of the importance of myth and folktale, as was the crucially important film by the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, Antonio das Mortes, made in 1969, the year I first arrived in Colombia.

Hence what seemed as important as or more important than the so-called objective conditions when I first went to Colombia was what Marxists called consciousness, which students of my generation saw not as a reflex of the economy but as a force for defining reality and the possibilities for changing it. We lived that experience in the 1960s, and in the 1970s that experience gave birth, through people such as Stuart Hall, to the idea of cultural studies. The concept of commodity fetishism helped me feel my way into consciousness, but what I didn't take was the next step, which was to ponder the forms and feel of expression, of how ideas work emotionally and paint a picture of the world on account of the way they are put into language. Today I would say that only literature, meaning fiction and forms of documentary overlapping with fictionwhat I have elsewhere called fictocriticismcan do this.

As the years rolled by and the situation got increasingly grim in Colombiato which I returned every yearthe ideas of Nietzsche and then Georges Bataille claimed my attention because they seemed so relevant to the violence and extremity that characterized life for poor rural people. In my shamanism book (Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing) published seven years after the devil book, I struggled to better understand the violence of the atrocities of the rubber boom in the Putumayo region of the Upper Amazon around 1900, and that understanding made me focus increasingly on the talking and writing of terror, coupled with mounting sensitivity as to how most writing on violence makes it worse.

My theory thenas nowwas that stories of terror and extremity have a great power to shape reality (in good part through uncertainty), passing along a chain of storytellers. Thus the task of the storyteller who wishes to break the chain, as I saw it, was to step up to the plate and come up with a new story, knowing full well that the chain can never be stopped and that sooner or later another story will displace yours. Such is the world of violence and memory, bound necessarily to fiction. Recognition of this state of affairs, however, leads not only to a sobering pessimism, but to the sliver of a possibility that maybe, just maybe, the tension of this interval between your displacing story and the next story that will displace it can create a force field in which the violence can be transmuted into healing. This I call penultimaticity, writing as the one permanently before the end.