Reviews for Women and economic development

The average rating for Women and economic development based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-20 00:00:00 Rui Xie Despite the title, this is not an exploration of satanic rituals – but it is very much an ethnography of religion, colonialism and the changes brought about in life experience as a result of the imposition of the new ways of being that colonialism brings about. Good cross cultural scholarship and ethnography can expose and reveal an enormous amount about the ‘home’ culture of the researcher while at the same time unravelling and allowing us to make sense of another way of being and living. In this case, Taussig has problematised many of the taken for granted aspects of capitalism, not as an exploitative economic system or any of those other critiques from the left, but in terms of a capitalist way of relating to the people and things around us (the things Bertell Ollman explores in his brilliant book Alienation even though it, too, is demanding). He has done this be taking two cases of societies-in-transition, of communities in Colombia and Bolivia where the peasantry is becoming proletarianised – that is, being made into a working class we can recognise as waged labourer. Based on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s, Taussig was able to draw on informants whose lives spanned much of the 20th century and as such who had witnessed and been part of the gradual collapse of the traditional hacienda system with it social relations and hierarchies in favour of a gradual incorporation in a global capitalist economy. He built the case around two settings. In the first, we see peasant farmers in north-west Colombia being drawn into capitalist agriculture, but more importantly whose residual peasant systems are being rolled back as agribusiness established itself in the region. In the second, he draws on evidence from mining communities in Bolivia, where the change is much slower – there were commercial mines from the time of Spanish conquest – but the industrial change much more severe as workers are removed from anything resembling the former agricultural settings. In both cases, his analysis turns around systems of exchange. In the Colombian case (the Cauca valley, on Colombia’s Pacific coast), he paints a picture of two parallel economic systems – a peasant economy built on notions of gift, reciprocity and exchange with minimal need for cash, and a capitalist economy based in the trade in commodities and dependence on externally supplied markets. As part of this transition, peasant small holdings allowing relative self-sufficiency (he is careful not to romanticise the extent of self-sufficiency or quality of life) with work cycles based in mutuality were being wound back as agribusiness, in this case sugar, established itself as the dominant cash crop and peasant farmers were transformed into farm labourers. The role of the devil in the cosmology of this region centres on the ability to gain advantage over others, principally through deals done to produce wealth – but the cost of these deals it enormous: first, the land becomes unproductive and second the wealth is tainted and cannot be used for anything but consumption. That is, the cost of consorting with the devil is the loss of productivity. The devil, then, can only be invoked in the capitalist economy, not the peasant economy which is, to a large degree, non-acquisitive and local provisions prevent the transfer of peasant wealth to descendants. Crucially, the devil arrived with colonialism, and in this area had become associated with the conservative land owning class that, among other things, invoked the devil and the church to maintain its power through years of conflict in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is, the devil informs a class analysis and class consciousness among workers in the region. Taussig is careful not to overplay this relation, but to see the devil (and therefore an external source of evil) as a factor in the breakdown of older forms of peasant-based reciprocity in favour of capitalist social relations. The other case draws on a very different experience of proletarianisation in the form of commercial mining in and around Oruro in Bolivia. Here the economic transformation is quite different, given the extent of disruption to lifestyles, but also there is a very different underlying cosmology drawing on local concepts of balance and Inca notions of dominant deities (with all the contradictions this brings). Here, the devil-like form is the controller of the mines who must be propitiated and who remains a constant threat to miners. Again, drawing on historical evidence and field work with older miners and several centuries of archival material, Taussig is able to point to a transformation in owners’/bosses’ relations with these cosmological forces. In this case, however, the change is not newly framed capitalist relations but the nationalisation of the mines in the late 1940s. The picture Taussig paints is of previous owners’ recognising the power of the devil, here called Tio (uncle), as a force in mine production and safety; a recognition lost once bureaucratic management took over under state ownership. The image of the devil in these miners’ lives is much more complex that the clearer lines of change in the Colombian case in part because Taussig is able to show how traditional cosmology provided sites for resistance of both Inca rule and subsequent Spanish and later rule. He paints a compelling picture of colonised peoples taking on the cosmology of their rulers and reinscribing the figures of that religion (the Inca’s Sun God, from the Spaniards, Christ, the Devil and the Virgin) and weaving them into their cosmology and with it their way of organising the world to make those figures forces of resistance to external dominance and assertion of local autonomy and control. Once again, he draws a powerful contrast with gift economies and systems of reciprocity, and in doing so reveals the changes social links, relations and associations associated with capitalist relations of production. These are rich and engaging ethnographies that tell us much about social relations in transition in these regions. This is enough to make the book valuable. There is the second tier, however, that Taussig notes early in the discussion but then, for the most part, leaves implicit. For many of us, capitalism is simply a taken for granted, along with the ways and forms of social relations that flow from it. Stepping back from that set of taken for granted views by looking a societies-in-transition allows us to ask significant questions dominant everyday ways of being in the world – and this is where commodity fetishism comes into the case. This notion, developed most comprehensively by Marx in Capital, provides a means to explain acquisition and the mediation of social relations through things. It is not an easy concept to get hold of; Taussig’s way into the problem here is to present commodity fetishism though the distinction between use value (which he sees as the dominant facet of gift/reciprocal/peasant economies) and exchange value (as the dominant form of value in capitalism). In this he is being classically Marxist (the book remains, for me, one of the best pieces of Marxist analysis and for that reason alone is great for teaching). As a result of this analysis, Taussig has not only given us a rich ethnography but has allowed us as readers to look back on our ways of being (that frame and shape our reading position) to allow us to ask fundamental questions about social organisation, cosmology and ways of being in capitalist societies. The book was first published in 1980, and I first read it a few years later while still an undergraduate; it hurt my head then, especially the opening theoretical chapters, and it is still, in places, quite demanding, but I think 30 years later I recognise its power and importance, its subtle grasp of the cultural relations of colonialism and its insightful and important interweaving of economic, religious and daily social relations into a potent explanation of how oppressed and marginalised groups make sense of and keep power over their lives and ways of being in the world. Three decades later and on a second read, I still think it one of the finest analyses of social relations, of colonialism and resistance to it and of the alienation from self (individually and collectively) that results from capitalism’s form.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-07 00:00:00 Shawn Davis I can easily see this being adapted into a film. It's not a heavy-theoretically driven anthropological piece, but it's a fascinating read of the trajectory of commodity fetishism from the precapitalist society to the early 80s Colombia and Bolivia from a mix of Marxist-Maussian approach, religious and magical thinking. Was hoping for a more anthropological exploration of mining and mineral though.