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Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'
Calibán y la bruja: Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria by Silvia Federici
1 review
savvylit's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
During the late Middle Ages, European thought and philosophy shifted to a view of man as machine. This separation between body and mind created a larger cultural distaste for anything natural and animalistic. The church also reinforced these same ideas. Church and state united to encourage European people to think of their body as inherently sinful and to instead use their minds to avoid lazy or hedonistic behavior. Work was godly. Work was good. Work required disciplining your mind and treating your body like a tool. Thus, we have the dawn of assessing humans by their labor-power. The foundation for capitalism. Additionally, the church and state disdaining all things bodily made it so that women's traditional work and knowledge became necessary to destroy. Thus, the dawning of the witch-hunt.
"The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy their social power."
The witch-hunt was essential to early capitalism. So many of the harmful views that Western culture still retains were established during the witch-hunt era specifically to create and serve an increasingly labor-obssessed capitalist society. Not only that, but so much was lost. Unknown amounts of communal culture burned at the stake alongside the "witches." A culture of resistance, of healing & midwifery, of art, of feminine and collective power... It is incredibly unsettling to think of how little this literal and cultural genocide is studied in modern world history courses. I am so grateful that reading this book has allowed me to see how the intentional omission of this topic has allowed some of the worst aspects of witch-hunts to be perpetuated to this day.
I highly recommend this book. If you hate the patriarchy and hate capitalism then this book is for you.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Chronic illness, Violence, Torture, Sexism, Genocide, Religious bigotry, and Rape
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