The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael T Taussig

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael T Taussig

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The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael T Taussig

Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, is an image which mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition.
Original, acute, and admirable"" - E. J. Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books

""Fortunately for the reader, the author is not only a sophisticated practicing anthropologist--and incidentally a medical man--but also a person of wide and cosmopolitan literary culture. . . . The interest of this exercise extends far beyond two backward corners of South America. How human beings make intellectual sense of the world in which they live, and which they no longer even partially control, is a question which concerns all of us. What they do with the 'social constructions (and deceptions) of reality' is equally significant. For men strive not only to understand but to change the world."" - E. J. Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books

""Taussig succeeds brilliantly in his central purpose: to help us to see the challenge as being to defetishize, to control our culture and its poetic products, and not be controlled by them."" - Labour
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780807841068
ISBN 10 0807841064
Title The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
Author Michael T Taussig
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press
Year published 1983-01-24
Number of pages 277
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.