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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
sad
slow-paced
Fundamental in understanding the history of capitalism and its domination of women. An excellent full-reread after reading excerpts for class last year.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Análise extensa sobre a transição do feudalismo para o capitalismo e como esta culminou na caça às bruxas e na expansão colonial.
É olhar para a história e entendê-la com uma perspectiva de género.
Leitura essencial.
É olhar para a história e entendê-la com uma perspectiva de género.
Leitura essencial.
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This book has an extremely wide scope, temporally, geographically, and analytically, and Federici synthesizes it all very impressively. I am very glad I read this as it has served as a jumping off point from which I will tumble down numerous other historical and sociological rabbit holes. As other reviewers have said with more detail and style than I can, I found the main thesis to be somewhat over-argued, which is often partially disguised by the deft assemblages of dispersed facts and the strong writing. I think the book would have been stronger without such a tendency to universalize, and with more interrogation of some of the underlying assumptions. A valuable read nonetheless.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I wish I had been introduced to this reading of history as a teen. So many things appear in a different light. This makes me aware of how ingrained I am in the capitalist, patriarchal system we live in — and which is not actually that old, only some hundreds of years. And of course this makes me angry too. The things they’ve done to us.
I’ve recently been thinking about how present-day feminism longs for an enchanted world, and whilst I can’t find it in myself to get excited about things like Women Who Run with Wolves, Federici points out, with calm Marxist analysis, that it’s not a requirement. I can keep my head cool and still hate the fact that the world has been disenchanted for us.
This really should be compulsory reading for everyone.
I’ve recently been thinking about how present-day feminism longs for an enchanted world, and whilst I can’t find it in myself to get excited about things like Women Who Run with Wolves, Federici points out, with calm Marxist analysis, that it’s not a requirement. I can keep my head cool and still hate the fact that the world has been disenchanted for us.
This really should be compulsory reading for everyone.
I don’t want to learn about European history from any white person who is not Silvia Federici!
Caliban and the Witch is this wonderfully complex interpretation of history, focusing on the way bodies, and especially women's bodies, were instrumentalized in the making of capitalism. It reads so easily, yet it is so mind-blowing. It's the first time I can really see her argument, although I've been reading about the history of capitalism for about three years: that is, how capitalism bases itself on complex forms of domination and, more importantly, ideological divisions between different "kinds" of human beings, some, more deserving than others (by gender, by race, by class).
Federici does an overview of historical events from about the 1400 onward to the end of the 1600, when most of the witch hunts cease, having already achieved the desired result (the one Federici believes in): the power of the state settled, classes divided deep within themselves, women having become submissive to men in ways impossible in feudal times. The author follows the threads of epidemics such as the Black Death, of religion and its forces, of agrarian upheavals and of discourses on body and sexuality, bringing up an dimension of history that Foucault and Marx impressively missed: gender.
Foucault wrote about the body being disciplined and sexuality being tamed without looking at the most remarkable instance of it: the witch hunts. They were instances of torture, scare tactics and killing in which states systematically engaged, breaking trust between neighbors and spouses, subjecting women to incredible violence in a very disciplinary, Foucauldian manner, ending up shaping the "womanly", pure, aseptic, vassal to her man.
Marx wrote about primitive accumulation in early capitalism as if it had affected men and women equally - Federici argues strongly that it hadn't. In fact, she shows that, by strongly regulating births (not only with accusations of witchcraft, but having infanticide as one of the worst crimes, and with distrusting and surveilling midwifes), women's body itself has been turned into a source of workforce, of production. Not only she is reproducing the work force of her husband by taking care of house duties, but she is effectively made into a reproduction machine by procreating.
Federici argues that capitalism has not led to a kind of worker freedom from serfdom, but rather, it has inscribed upon bodies themselves divisions of labor that are still present today.
"The first machine created by capitalism wasn't the steam engine, nor the clock; it was the human body" (aprox. translation from the Romanian edition pg. 236). One can follow this concept in Descartes' mind/body dualism, in which the body is pushed outside of the self, it is made into a separate, controllable machine - it is dehumanized. Federici goes on to show how witch hunts in Europe are tied to colonialism and witch hunts in the Americas, informing on each other's tactics, and being used for confinement - of the body, of relationships, or of the land, seizing up common territories.
While not all arguments are as well rounded as the main idea, I think it is a great book, worth reading, and an "alternative" history worth exploring. Questions still remain - what is tied up to what, exactly? We have religion, illness, power and state control, intellectual discourse and military action, property and economics, food and hunger, sexuality and body, gender and race, all influencing each other in multiple ways. However, I think she manages to write a wonderful book and put forward the very complex, compelling idea, of capitalism using gendered bodies to built its system from the very beginning.
Federici does an overview of historical events from about the 1400 onward to the end of the 1600, when most of the witch hunts cease, having already achieved the desired result (the one Federici believes in): the power of the state settled, classes divided deep within themselves, women having become submissive to men in ways impossible in feudal times. The author follows the threads of epidemics such as the Black Death, of religion and its forces, of agrarian upheavals and of discourses on body and sexuality, bringing up an dimension of history that Foucault and Marx impressively missed: gender.
Foucault wrote about the body being disciplined and sexuality being tamed without looking at the most remarkable instance of it: the witch hunts. They were instances of torture, scare tactics and killing in which states systematically engaged, breaking trust between neighbors and spouses, subjecting women to incredible violence in a very disciplinary, Foucauldian manner, ending up shaping the "womanly", pure, aseptic, vassal to her man.
Marx wrote about primitive accumulation in early capitalism as if it had affected men and women equally - Federici argues strongly that it hadn't. In fact, she shows that, by strongly regulating births (not only with accusations of witchcraft, but having infanticide as one of the worst crimes, and with distrusting and surveilling midwifes), women's body itself has been turned into a source of workforce, of production. Not only she is reproducing the work force of her husband by taking care of house duties, but she is effectively made into a reproduction machine by procreating.
Federici argues that capitalism has not led to a kind of worker freedom from serfdom, but rather, it has inscribed upon bodies themselves divisions of labor that are still present today.
"The first machine created by capitalism wasn't the steam engine, nor the clock; it was the human body" (aprox. translation from the Romanian edition pg. 236). One can follow this concept in Descartes' mind/body dualism, in which the body is pushed outside of the self, it is made into a separate, controllable machine - it is dehumanized. Federici goes on to show how witch hunts in Europe are tied to colonialism and witch hunts in the Americas, informing on each other's tactics, and being used for confinement - of the body, of relationships, or of the land, seizing up common territories.
While not all arguments are as well rounded as the main idea, I think it is a great book, worth reading, and an "alternative" history worth exploring. Questions still remain - what is tied up to what, exactly? We have religion, illness, power and state control, intellectual discourse and military action, property and economics, food and hunger, sexuality and body, gender and race, all influencing each other in multiple ways. However, I think she manages to write a wonderful book and put forward the very complex, compelling idea, of capitalism using gendered bodies to built its system from the very beginning.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced