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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
genius fucking book. silvia federici is a legend. makes me wanna never read a piece of marxist literature that doesn’t take a strong feminist stance ever again. federici’s in-depth study of the integral role that women’s oppression played in the birth of capitalism via sowing class division along gendered lines clarifies that women’s liberation is a necessary condition for bringing about our collective liberation. 10/10 piece of writing. will refer back to this book for the rest of my life
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Caliban and the witch (pub. 2004) shows us the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism through a feminist lense, including also the infamous witch hunts and the gendered division of labour which is starting to be spoken about again in the world currently. It introduced me to primitive accumulation, something I've never heard of before since I haven't read Marx yet, which is the theory of how class distinctions began, in Marxist economic theory. It claims that the capital-owning class came to be when they gave the proletariat no choice but to earn a wage by working on the privatised land that they first conquered & enclosed.
Before finishing the book I read some reviews claiming that Federici has left out important historical information about the witch hunts by watering the details down, so do keep that in mind when reading.
Before finishing the book I read some reviews claiming that Federici has left out important historical information about the witch hunts by watering the details down, so do keep that in mind when reading.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual violence
I wanted to like this more than I did, though there were parts I enjoyed. On the whole there are some important ideas and ways of re-examining history in it that I'm glad to have been exposed to.
I wasn't as into the swamp of intellectual jargon (it reads like a academic thesis.. was it one?), the flimsy arguments and hand-waving conclusions, the selective omission of relevant contradictory evidence (such as: blaming hunger/etc during the ~1500's - ~1700's only on early capitalism and enclosure of the commons without ever mentioning the substantial impact on food production caused by the Little Ice Age during the same time period).
As a result, the book comes across as a deep yet narrowly researched dive on the topics it covers.
I wasn't as into the swamp of intellectual jargon (it reads like a academic thesis.. was it one?), the flimsy arguments and hand-waving conclusions, the selective omission of relevant contradictory evidence (such as: blaming hunger/etc during the ~1500's - ~1700's only on early capitalism and enclosure of the commons without ever mentioning the substantial impact on food production caused by the Little Ice Age during the same time period).
As a result, the book comes across as a deep yet narrowly researched dive on the topics it covers.
dark
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
What a mess of an essay that was... First of all, it would be truer to the content to reverse the order of the title in "primitive accumulation, women and the body", as two thirds of the essay are concerned with the economy of the middles ages. Federici never manages to successfully intertwine her themes to achieve a final product that makes its point based on all the different aspects that were broached: reading 130 pages on how the economy changed in the medieval period didn't enable me to better grasp the witch-hunt, since this chapter does not rely on the demonstrations from the previous chapter.
There is also this very frustrating impression that every chapter is an introduction for the following, with the promise of diving deeper in a subject, while this never happens. On the contrary, instead of diving deeper, Federici at best repeats herself, while sometimes completely contradicting a point made two pages ago (as is the case for her explanation for the end of witch-hunting).
Even more problematic is her tendency to overly quote other works, before bringing her own conclusion without any logic link with the argument made, and without any justification. There are some points that are dubious (she mentions the Great Plague twice, with completely different dates), and uses an unsubstantiated urban legend as the sure etymology of "Faggot". She also tends to turn some issues into complex ones and read some things into it when really, there was nothing much to prove (as with her final chapter, when she spend pages and pages explaining the witch-hunt in Latin America to conclude that all this argumentation could explain the coincidences in representation of witchcraft in Latin America and in Europe : as both representations and accusations were made by Europeans, I don't see why one should even wonder about the similarities?)
A truly disappointing essay that is blotchy, frustrating, and that never actually deals with its subject.
There is also this very frustrating impression that every chapter is an introduction for the following, with the promise of diving deeper in a subject, while this never happens. On the contrary, instead of diving deeper, Federici at best repeats herself, while sometimes completely contradicting a point made two pages ago (as is the case for her explanation for the end of witch-hunting).
Even more problematic is her tendency to overly quote other works, before bringing her own conclusion without any logic link with the argument made, and without any justification. There are some points that are dubious (she mentions the Great Plague twice, with completely different dates), and uses an unsubstantiated urban legend as the sure etymology of "Faggot". She also tends to turn some issues into complex ones and read some things into it when really, there was nothing much to prove (as with her final chapter, when she spend pages and pages explaining the witch-hunt in Latin America to conclude that all this argumentation could explain the coincidences in representation of witchcraft in Latin America and in Europe : as both representations and accusations were made by Europeans, I don't see why one should even wonder about the similarities?)
A truly disappointing essay that is blotchy, frustrating, and that never actually deals with its subject.
challenging
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced