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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
this was admittedly my first big feminist book i’ve read.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
something tells me I'm gonna read this again and again and again...
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Was always fascinated by the heretics, the western after reading [b:The Name of the Rose|119073|The Name of the Rose|Umberto Eco|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415375471l/119073._SY75_.jpg|3138328] and eastern after [b:Narrenturm|1812595|Narrenturm (Trylogia husycka, #1)|Andrzej Sapkowski|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1283105031l/1812595._SY75_.jpg|7038935].
There are a few books whose effect on me is so profound that it marks an inflection point in my understanding of history and theory: Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"; Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"; and Gerald Horne's "The Counterrevolution of 1776" are perhaps at the top of the list. With Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch" I find a new entry. The level of detail she provides to offer an incisive critique of Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation in the "transition" from feudalism to capitalism is astounding. Admittedly, the Middle Ages in Europe is a period I have not read nearly enough about, and suffice it to say, I was blown away with what I didn't know. She links the mass execution of hundreds of thousands of heretics and witches - both in Europe and in the colonies in America - to the enclosure of land and the conversion of the body into a machine. In fact, she goes further: "the witch-hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power"
As it relates to the expansion of colonialism in the New World, she says "the counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were not the Renaissance magicians, but the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the "New World" shared a destiny similar to that of women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation."
I think one of the more powerful claims she makes has to do with the totality and institutionalization of mass murder of women, calling it a war on women. In fact, she goes on, the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-state, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
There are so many other points I wish I could go into here, but I'll just say this: it is a full analysis of communalism, feudalism, and capitalism, and the role that women played (and play) in each social formation. Reading this work and understanding the crucial positioning of women allows a more nuanced understanding of the "inevitability" of capitalism, the "transition" period between feudalism and capitalism, and, as she brilliantly describes, how it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.
As it relates to the expansion of colonialism in the New World, she says "the counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were not the Renaissance magicians, but the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the "New World" shared a destiny similar to that of women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation."
I think one of the more powerful claims she makes has to do with the totality and institutionalization of mass murder of women, calling it a war on women. In fact, she goes on, the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-state, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
There are so many other points I wish I could go into here, but I'll just say this: it is a full analysis of communalism, feudalism, and capitalism, and the role that women played (and play) in each social formation. Reading this work and understanding the crucial positioning of women allows a more nuanced understanding of the "inevitability" of capitalism, the "transition" period between feudalism and capitalism, and, as she brilliantly describes, how it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.
i became interested in this book thanks to some recommendations from friends and writers i like. i hoped this book would better prepare me, my vocabulary, and spirit to be a better co-worker/organizer in the workplace. every hope was surpassed in leaps and bounds truly. Caliban and the Witch is a deeply instructive and deeply moving look into the co-construction of capitalism, race, and gender as structures forced into being by the extension of power and repression by the catholic church and landowners threatened by the admirable and crafty revolts against serfdom by witches, heretics, laborers,n peasants. Later, we see the other side of this terror as settlers and colonists replicate their fears and needs for control in the Americas, persecution and repressing indigenous women, co creating mythos about the "cannibalism" of the indigenous with the attempted indoctrination to christianity as a haven from hell/the devil's grasp. Federici makes incredible use of primary resources- we gain amazing context for the visuality of witches/how information and fear was spread through prints-,her endnotes are sharp and lead the way to further sources, not that I read all of them. I would reccommend this impressive and beautiful book to anyone who does healing, organizing, anti-colonial work, decolonial work, or studies the persecution of witches, marxism, labor organizing.
this book will stay with me, will remind me to look for magic at work, to share it with my coworkers, to eat plants from the ground, to remember that we once used to drink blood for our health. to keep my eyes open.
i underlined a lot of passages, but one of my favorites starts on page 172:
In the eyes of the new capitalist class, this (magic and ritual practice), anarchic, molecular conception of the diffusion of power in the world was anathema. Aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic, and the possibility of establishing a privileged relation with the natural elements, as well as the belief in the existence of powers available only to particular individuals, and thus not easily generalized and exploitable. Magic was also and obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment to the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal to work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
this book will stay with me, will remind me to look for magic at work, to share it with my coworkers, to eat plants from the ground, to remember that we once used to drink blood for our health. to keep my eyes open.
i underlined a lot of passages, but one of my favorites starts on page 172:
In the eyes of the new capitalist class, this (magic and ritual practice), anarchic, molecular conception of the diffusion of power in the world was anathema. Aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic, and the possibility of establishing a privileged relation with the natural elements, as well as the belief in the existence of powers available only to particular individuals, and thus not easily generalized and exploitable. Magic was also and obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment to the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal to work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.