Poetics and Politics in Ecuadorian Andes

8/12/2019 Poetics and Politics in Ecuadorian Andes

1/24

Poetics and Politics in the Ecuadorean Andes: Women's Narratives of Death and DevilPossessionAuthor(s): Mary M. CrainSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 67-89Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645565Accessed: 20/04/2009 06:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/645565?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=blackhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=blackhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/645565?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/24

poetics and politics in the Ecuadorean Andes:women's narratives of death and devil possession

MARY M. CRAIN-University of Barcelona

[I]n pite of a persistent iction, we never write on a blank page but always on one that has already beenwritten n.

-Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [1984:43]

In 1983, in the community of Quimsa, Ecuador, conflicting ideologies and interpretations ofthe development process emerged during a period of political mobilization that involved peas-ants and local commercial farmers in a struggle over land and employment issues. For somethree decades, large farmers had been replacing labor-intensive estate production with capital-intensive mechanized agriculture. While significant change had taken place in the social andeconomic relations of production on the large estates, political unrest during the period of myfieldwork indicated that the new economic order had not been hegemonically installed (cf.Crain 1988). Although women were active in community-level decision making during this

period of peasant political mobilization, it was primarily male peasants who assumed the po-sitions of leadership and controlled the public debates. During this period, however, a male

peasant who worked as a foreman on a neighboring commercial farm died suddenly and mys-teriously. Peasant women murmured that his death had been caused by devil possession. Sub-

sequently, other stories of devil possession linking male employees to the capitalist farm econ-omy emerged. Articulated by peasant women, this discourse about the devil was also fre-

quently associated with other aspects of the development process, and it became a prominentidiom for talking about material change and the women's opposition to that change.

This article examines the political implications of these narratives about devil possession. If

language is the medium of social practice, then it is through an analysis of language that wecan come to understand the ways in which ideologies as well as various forms of politics areconstituted (cf. Thompson 1984). Following Foucault (1980:82-83), I will analyze these nar-ratives as a "subjugated discourse" developed in counterpoint to the master-narratives of de-velopment elaborated by state institutions and commercial farmers, narratives that promote a

In their recent review of anthropological writing, Marcus and Fischer (1986:84-86) have noted that anthropological analyses of political economy tend to neglectissues of cultural meaning. These authors argue that interpretive anthropology hasoften elided historical processes and has not always situated its analyses with re-spect to the broader perspectives of political economy. This article attempts tobridge these concerns by examining narratives recounted by female peasants ofhighland Ecuador that attribute several recent deaths of male wage laborers todevil possession. Refracted against an expanding global economy, the analysis fo-

cuses on the ways in which peasant cosmology and gender and class ideologiesare inscribed in these devil narratives and produce meanings that resist the com-modification of labor. Through such stories the unofficial voices of peasant womendisrupt attempts by commercial farmers o redefine the meaning of work under thenew relations of production on local estates. [Ecuador, gender, peasant cosmol-ogy, politics of domination and resistance, political economy]

poetics and politics in the Andes 67


3/24

local version of "the Green Revolution" (cf. Crain 1989). Through such "magical discourses"

peasant women refashion self and society by constructing an alternative world that contests thedominant interpretations and definitions of "the real" (cf. Crain 1989, 1990). My analysis willdemonstrate how an ideology of resistance is implicit in this subaltern devil-lore. The womenwho elaborate these stories become spokespersons for the community, and their specific po-sition will be accounted for and related to these texts. The cultural critique emanating fromtheir accounts belongs to the community as a whole; it is not solely the property of women, asmale peasants also voice it at times.'

The women's narratives constitute a form of politics, provided we expand our understandingof "the political" to include various modes of resistance occurring in informal domestic do-mains. Such domains are often excluded from Western definitions of "the political," whichwed it to the formal, public, and visible aspects of social life that are frequently associated withthe hierarchical, institutionalized structures of the state. By assigning all importance to formal

political structures, such definitions ignore the more covert dimensions of resistance. This ar-ticle proceeds by questioning both the hierarchy implicit in the "formal politics" versus "in-formal politics" distinction and the idea that these entities constitute two closed and separatespheres. This analysis traces the lines of influence connecting private forms of power and re-sistance to politics exercised in more public arenas. It also explores how the actual practicesof individual men and women may at times cross the ostensible boundaries between these two

spheres.The women's stories provide us with an opportunity to examine peasant attitudes toward self,

work, the natural world, and society, in contradistinction to the emergent definitions of these

categories that the local version of capitalism attempts to impose. Focusing on the progressivesubordination of the male worker to the wage form, these stories show how individual menbecome estranged from their families and communities. For the purposes of the present anal-

ysis, these stories will be "read" as collective utterances and not as individual texts.2 This ap-proach is in keeping with Jameson's (1981:70-76) suggestion that narratives be regarded as

socially symbolic acts and that the task of the analyst-interpreter s to reveal the broader socialfield from which such narratives emerge. This field includes a series of "semantic horizons"that enable any given text to be situated historically and "rewritten" in terms of the categoriesof political economy and competing modes of production (cf. Wolf 1982:387). Jameson viewsall narrative as informed by a political unconscious, arguing that stories can be regarded ascollective and class discourses that are, ultimately, symbolic meditations on "the destiny of

community" (Jameson 1981:70).

ethnographic context: unsettling deaths

I was attending my first funeral in Quimsa. A hacienda worker named Lucho Sandoval, withwhom I had conversed only three days earlier, had died suddenly at a very young age. His wasa mysterious death. His body had been found early Saturday morning not too far from myhome-at the bottom of a large ravine some 30 meters in depth. The ravine was located on ahillside called Madre de Dios, about half a kilometer from Lucho's home. Lucho had last beenseen by two of his compadres (male co-parents) in the afternoon around dusk, and they had

thoughthe was

headingtoward Madre de Dios.

I sat at the wake and watched while several comadres (female co-parents) washed his slender

body with a damp cloth and dressed it in a long white robe. He was then gently lowered intoan open casket. The clothing Lucho had worn on the day of his death was placed inside thecasket along with a spoon, a cup, and a bowl, provisions for his sustenance in the afterlife. Byearly evening, neighbors, friends, and more distant relatives had arrived, bringing food as wellas flowers, candles, and wooden images of saints that were placed along both sides of his cas-

68 american ethnologist


4/24

ket. A somber atmosphere reigned as peasants huddled together on wooden benches raised

only slightly above the earthen floor. Papa Ram6n, a lay prayer-reader, began to recite theprayers or the dead and then led the community in singing several Catholic hymns. The singingwas interspersed with long wails of lament in Quichua uttered by Lucho's wife, Barbara, andother female relatives, all of whom wept openly. One of Lucho's youngest sons, Carlos, dartedin and out through the crowd in order to get closer to his father's casket. While others werebusy singing he reached up and gently stroked his father's face.

The prayers and all the solemnity they entailed were broken by the smells of home-cookedfoods, roasted guinea pigs and steamed potatoes. Enormous helpings of these dishes wereserved, and bottles of aguardiente (a strong liquor) were freely passed around the room. As thenight wore on, many others wept, and the drinking was heavy. Those peasants who grew tiredand intoxicated spread their ponchos in a haphazard fashion on the earthen floor, and so amass of men, women, and children drifted into a groggy sleep. At some point after midnight,those who were still awake took part in a gay form of charades. Several individuals rose to thefloor and performed pantomimes, pretending to be various animals such as tapirs, horses, roos-ters, and bulls.3 Lucho's funeral, in effect, became a space in which to play, to turn away fromgrief and embrace life.

My life and Lucho's had already become intertwined in several ways. His wife and I hadbeen friends for over a year. He also happened to be the uncle of Susana, my capricious 14-

year-old kitchen helper and constant companion. I had met Lucho only three days prior to hisdeath. This encounter made the news of his death particularly unsettling to me, as someonewho had just entered my social world had suddenly been wrenched from it. Lucho and I hadbeen introduced at a neighborhood store. We had shared a beer while he talked to me abouthis job as the foreman at the Hacienda La Miranda's sawmill complex. He oversaw a team ofnine men who worked felling the pine and eucalyptus trees of the private forest.

Three days after this conversation, Susana had come running to my home to tell me the cir-cumstances of her uncle's death. She and I had walked together to the deep ravine and watchedwhile several men hauled out Lucho's limp body. Don Tatamuez, the local sheriff, had comefrom the county seat in order to confirm the death and examine the body. After half an hour ofexamination, he turned to the crowd and reported that Lucho might well have slipped into theravine accidentally. According to Tatamuez, Lucho had apparently suffered a concussion as aresult of receiving a sharp blow to the left side of his head. It seemed possible that when Luchofell, his head had struck against some rocks protruding from one side of the ravine. Followingthis pronouncement several men, including the sheriff, hoisted Lucho's body onto their shoul-ders and accompanied his family members back home.

At the wake, I was surrounded by neighbors and friends. Many members of the peasant com-munity had gathered together to mourn Lucho's passing. His death seemed particularly tragic.Lucho was only 36 years old, he was the father of five children, and his wife, Barbara, waspregnant with another child. In addition, certain aspects of his death made no sense. In the daysthat followed this unhappy event, there was a great deal of uneasiness whenever his namebecame the topic of conversation. Most people were puzzled as to the actual cause of his un-timely death. Although there was a great deal of talking, there were no readily available expla-nations.

During the wake, I reflected on some of the rumors that had been circulating in the com-

munity.How could one account for this

mysteriousdeath? Based on the

wayin which his

bodyhad landed in the ravine, one or two individuals agreed with the sheriff's speculation that hemight have slipped and fallen from one of the mud footpaths. Many argued that this wouldhave been even more likely had he also been drinking. But according to the coroner's reportthat was issued several days after the discovery of the body, there were no indications of intox-ication. Others said that someone might have pushed Lucho into the ravine after dark on Friday.Susana told me that her mother believed that Lucho's death might have been the result of sor-



5/24

cery due to envidia (envy). When I asked her to explain this further, she said that one had toconsider Lucho's relatively young age, his high position in the hacienda work hierarchy, andthe fact that he had many material possessions. I had visited their home on several occasionsand never been particularly struck by a large number of consumer goods, but Susana arguedthat there were others in Quimsa, particularly co-workers, who were jealous of his apparentsuccess. "Don't you see?" she asked. "His house was painted, he had a refrigerator, n electric

blender, and a cassette player, and he also had pigs." According to Susana, the envious personmight have pushed Lucho into the ravine or, more likely, have sought the aid of a shaman inorder to cast a spell on him. Susana contended that the envious person bewitching Lucho wouldhave made a muieca de trapos (a doll fashioned of old rags) and brought this, along with a

plate of special foods, to a shaman.A Quimseno who wants to bewitch an "enemy" will commonly take a mufeca de trapos to

a shaman, who uses the doll as a medium for bewitching. The muneca represents the personbeing bewitched, and after a spell has been cast it is placed in the pathway of the enemy. If the

enemy passes close tothe

munecahe or she will become ill and be forced to counter this black

magic by seeing a healer or a shaman. Plates of food may also fall into the category of be-witched objects. Peasants generally regard the exchanging of food as a symbol of reciprocityand as a "disinterested act," one that binds individuals and families to one another through the

anticipation of a countergift (cf. Bourdieu 1977; Mauss 1967[1950]). In contrast, bewitchedfood (typically consisting of eggs, bread, and roasted guinea pig) is marked by a shaman's spelland is always left, anonymously, in close proximity to a daily route generally followed by the

enemy. In Quimsa, ravines, the pastures of the nearby commercial farm, and the exterior of

peasant homes are the three most popular sites for these hexed objects. A plate laden withbewitched food is associated with spiritual danger and must not be eaten or even touched (cf.

Salomon 1983).4 How does one know whether such a plate of food is intended for him or her?The mere sight of bewitched food is not enough. If, however, something bad happens to onewithin the next few days, then the bewitched object may be recalled and eventually be inter-

preted as the source of this new misfortune.Susana and other peasants suggested that additional factors might have heightened Lucho's

vulnerability to bewitchment of this sort. Lucho had, after all, evidently been wandering aloneat night, near the principal ravine of Madre de Dios. The combination of these three factors-the ravine, solitude, and nighttime-presaged danger. In folk cosmology, geography has an

important moral dimension, and many places that form part of the natural landscape are be-lieved to be endowed with both positive and negative qualities. According to local belief, it is

dangerous to walk or remain for an extended period of time near certain natural sites such asravines, irrigation canals, waterfalls, lakes, high mountain plains, and places where rainbows

appear, for such sites may be inhabited by evil spirits. Potentially harmful encounters with the

spirit world occur most frequently at night and when individuals are alone. (It is particularlydangerous for women to walk alone; cf. Brow 1990.) Individuals who are exposed to any com-bination of these circumstances run the risk of incurring folk diseases such as mal aire (evilwind) and susto (fright). Diseases such as these can be diagnosed and cured only by curanderas,or shamans, and not by practitioners of Western medicine.

Thus, multiple interpretations of Lucho's death-interpretations that were not always mu-

tually exclusive-were circulating. For example, shortly after this tragedy I visited my friend

Rosa. Knowing that Rosa was de confianza con Barbara on closest terms with Barbara), askedRosa what more she had heard. She looked at me, lowered her voice, and said, "Keep this asecret. Have you ever heard of a pact with the devil? Or the sacrifice of a person for a thing?"I nodded. Rosa said that that was what Barbara and some of her closest female relatives werenow saying had caused Lucho's death. I asked her to explain this further, and she exclaimed:"Don't you see? Those machines are big, dangerous, and powerful."



6/24

At that point we headed off to visit Barbara, whom we found in tears. We stayed for severalhours, attempting to offer companionship, and we talked about the difficulties she would havein supporting the family without Lucho. At one point, Rosa looked knowingly at Barbara andtold her that she had mentioned something to me about devil possession. Barbara hen raisedher voice in anger, arguing that all of their troubles had started with that "damned machine."I asked naYvely, "What machine?" and she answered, "The sawmill, of course." Barbara be-lieved that the sawmill machinery had been momentarily possessed by the spirit of the devil,and using the machine as its medium, the devil had begun to exert a controlling force overLucho. While Barbara didn't entirely dismiss the sheriff's speculation that her husband mighthave slipped into the ravine accidentally (and in fact this was the explanation her family had

given to certain "official others" who had arrived on the scene of the death early that Saturdaymorning), she paid little heed to this idea.5 She felt that her husband's death was rooted in amuch deeper metaphysical cause and that it could only be understood by examining the

strange sequence of events that had transpired during the last year of his life. Here, then, isBarbara's tory:

At the time that Lucho was made head of the sawmill workgang, he was also assigned a position ascaretaker f the hacienda's private orest reserve.6 norder o keep an eye on the imported machinery tthe sawmill and to make sure that no one pilfered rom he patrones' orest, Lucho built his home forour family on hacienda and, close to the sawmill. Lucho had all these responsibilities: e was alwaysagitated, lways watching, always keeping his guard, as he was concerned hat someone might eithersteal or damage he sawmill machine or take he really mportant ood, the recently elled timber romthe forest eserve, t night. He also had his duties as the overseer f the workgang, with nine men underhis supervision who were occasionally ealous of his position and his demands. And then our house,which Lucho built here, near the forest, was too isolated from others, from our neighbors and ourfamilies.

According to Barbara, Lucho had started having crazy dreams a year or so before his death.She would awaken in the middle of the night and hear him talking to someone. He wouldalways say the same thing: "Are you looking for me? Don't bother me." Then he would lieback down and drift back to sleep. The voices would come again later in the night, only thistime Lucho would frequently respond: "I'm coming " At this point he would rise from bed, gooutdoors to the sawmill machine, and turn it on and off to hear the sound of the motor running,in order to assure himself that it was operating satisfactorily. Barbara aid that there were manynights when her poor husband would start working and then fall asleep out by the machine.Worried, she would go outside and try to bring him back indoors. On several occasions, sheand the children had ended up sleeping by the machine alongside Lucho. From time to timeneighbors would tell her that they had heard the hum of the machine being turned on and off

duringthe

nightand had wondered what was

goingon.

Confiding in me, Barbara said that Lucho had become obsessed with his work. She whis-pered that he had been increasingly dominated by the spirit of the devil that had entered thesawmill machinery. Barbara had frequently insisted that they move away from both the ma-chine and the forest, but Lucho had always shrugged her off. Barbara regarded Lucho's noc-turnal "conversations," which had continued for over a year, as evidence of a struggle betweenhim and the dark forces, the devil. It had been the devil that had finally lured Lucho into theravine that night and taken his life.

Following this detailed account, I asked Barbara and Rosa three questions. First, who in thecommunity knew about Lucho's strange dreams? Barbara responded that it was primarily her

family,and Rosa mentioned that she had said

somethingabout them

toher

mother. I then askedif the devil possession version of Lucho's death had been suggested to the local patrones, theowners of the Hacienda La Miranda. I had seen the hacienda owners arrive at Barbara's houseon that Saturday morning after the news of Lucho's death had spread through the community.I now wondered if they had been told this story and what their response might have been. Rosaimmediately looked at me and said, "Oh no No mention of this was made to them " And evenif the rumor were eventually to reach them, she added, they certainly wouldn't take it seriously.



7/24

The patrones had been told "another version," the version proposed by the sheriff. While therest of my conversation with these two women left no doubt in my mind that they blamed thecommercial farmers for Lucho's death, they were not airing this conviction publicly.

Finally, I asked whether cases of devil possession leading to death had occurred in Quimsabefore. They both said yes and began to tell me two stories depicting similar sequences ofevents. The first of these concerned a 32-year-old man, Ricardo Meno, who had worked as an

irrigation canal cleaner for the Hacienda La Miranda. Feeling faint one afternoon, he had laiddown at home before going back to work in the pastures of La Cocha (a field adjacent to thenortheast boundary of the Hacienda La Miranda). When he closed his eyes he dreamed that hesaw the foreman of La Cocha supervising the construction of two new reservoirs that the ownersof the Hacienda La Miranda were having built there near the milk station: a large bulldozerwas scooping up the earth, and the foreman was mounted on a horse of monstrous proportions,with two big black dogs standing watch by his side.7 Then, just as the reservoirs were filling upwith water, the foreman turned into the devil and called out to Ricardo. The devil told him to

come on down to the Cocha area and start working at once. The devil fought to possess him.After his, Ricardo woke from his dream and recounted it to his wife. He rose with the intentionof returning to work, but he was weak and his wife put him back in bed. Later hat night hedied.

The other narrative centered on a death that had occurred shortly after the construction of anew road and bridge leading to the forest reserve of the Hacienda La Miranda. According to

Rosa, the patrones had decided that a good road had to be built across peasant territory o that

big trucks could enter this area to get lumber out of the forest more readily. The master-carpen-ter of the hacienda, Jorge Recalde, was responsible for the heavy machinery being used and forthe construction team, which included several day laborers. Rosa was cooking the noon mealsfor these men. She recalled that during the second afternoon one of the workers, Alberto Escola,came to her looking pale and preoccupied; the devil, he said, had just appeared to him in a

daydream and told him not to move any more earth or stones. Alberto was frightened and

stopped his shoveling. He also asked the other men to quit working and told the master-car-

penter to get off the bulldozing machine because something bad was going to happen. Alberto

kept saying that the devil insisted that the bridge not be finished. His talk about the devil clearly

upset the other men, and everybody looked worried. But the master-carpenter told the others

to continue working. When the bridge was finally finished late that afternoon Alberto wouldnot move from the site, and when it grew dark he lay down beside the bridge. Much later that

night his wife came and tried to drag him away. After several attempts she was finally able toget him home.

Several months later a tractor driver, Santiago Chaleco (a local peasant), was going along thisnew road on his way to plow one of the hacienda's wheat fields. After he crossed the bridge,his tractor slipped down the edge of the muddy embankment, killing him instantly. A peasantwoman who had been nearby said that the devil had taken control of the driver and his ma-chine. It was because of the devil's possession that Santiago had been unable to jump off themachine and save himself. Rosa and Barbara aid that Alberto's devil visitation had portendeddisaster-it had, for example, signaled Santiago's impending death. Both women stated thatthe bridge and road should never have been completed. They also expressed a great deal ofuneasiness about Alberto's future but noted that so far, nothing had happened to him.

In each of these narratives, men figured as the devil's victims. As they concluded their ac-

counts, Rosa and Barbara remarked that they fully expected further deaths from devil posses-sion to occur in association with these sites. They argued that no one should continue to workat the sawmill, and Barbara announced that she and her children were going to leave the house

by the forest.



8/24

commentary

As the preceding discussion suggests, subaltern explanations are not necessarily all of a piece(cf. Clifford 1986a; Price 1983). Instead, many voices clamor for attention. The multiple ver-sions of Lucho's death reflect the complexity of the local social reality from which theyemerged.8 One version proposes that Lucho's death was an accident, another concludes thatit was caused by envy and witchcraft, and yet another posits devil possession. In addition, a

variety of factors such as inauspiciousness of place, time of day, and state of being are invoked.To complicate matters even further, many of these explanations are not mutually exclusive.

However, each of them was aired in a particular context and was directed to a particular au-dience. The first version was the "official explanation" peasants gave to outsiders and non-

peasants, the second, the one they told among themselves. The heterogeneity of the variousversions reflects not only the general factors of gender and class but also the specific personalexperiences, attitudes, and idiosyncrasies of the individual storytellers.

As analyst, I cannot provide the one correct explanation or "reading" of Lucho's death (cf.Crapanzano 1986). I have tried to identify all the various explanations offered by members ofthe community. In the analysis that follows I will focus attention on women's stories of devil

possession. To do so is not to dismiss the other explanations entirely, as these were to someextent woven into the women's stories. For example, while privileging devil possession as thecause of Lucho's death, Barbara's story allowed for a certain degree of ambiguity, and neitherBarbara nor Rosa rejected the possibility of multiple causality. Barbara recognized that the sitesof Lucho's workplace and of their home had made her husband vulnerable to spirit attacks. Inaddition, she mentioned that once Lucho's bouts with the devil began, he had started operatingthe sawmill machine alone and at night, both dangerous states. Finally, Lucho's body had beenfound in an ominous place, a ravine. Such evidence suggested a cosmological basis for Lucho'sinitial vulnerability to devil possession. Barbara's remarks about the occasional jealousy of Lu-cho's co-workers, furthermore, offered supporting evidence for the "envy version" of Lucho'sdeath and lent plausibility to the notion that a fellow peasant might have been practicing witch-craft against him. This version pointed to inequalities within the peasant community and em-phasized Lucho's identification with the interests of the landed elite.

Focusing on these stories of devil possession will allow us to illuminate more general con-cerns, as this case can be compared with other cases illustrating he social significance of devilor demon possession for recently proletarianized groups. By examining these stories both asexplanations of Lucho's death and as a metaphor for the material changes that have transformed

everydaylife in

Quimsa duringthe

pastthree

decades,we can shed

lighton the cultural

mean-ings female peasants currently attribute to wage work.

devil-lore in comparative and historical perspective

Iwould like to posit that contemporary Quimsefo discourse about the devil serves as a codedpolitical language for peasant women and that it is through this discourse and related imagerythat local identity is consolidated. Seen in this light, sustaining cultural identity and differencevis-a-vis the dominant elites is a political act that does not require that these women be overtlyconscious of their role as

politicalactors

(cf.Kane

1986).Ideas about the local

devil, presentlycirculated by women, inform Quimseno notions of group identity and construct boundariesbetween peasant self and dominant other. In the contemporary setting the devil serves as ametonym for foreign technology, Western styles of development, and commercial farming. Inthis portion of the analysis I begin by comparing the local manifestations of devil-lore with thosediscussed by Nash, Ong, and Taussig. I then present evidence indicating that the devil hasfigured as a central element in the Quimsefio historical consciousness and is embedded in a



9/24

particular local history of social relations; earlier devil-lore, too, sustained notions of groupidentity among peasants and provided the terms for representing the landed elite.

As Nash (1979), Silverblatt 1980), and Taussig (1980) have pointed out, the devil figure wasnot native to the religions of the New World. Rather, he Christian devil was brought by Spanishcolonizers and was superimposed on the indigenous cultures through a process of "forced ac-culturation." In its new context, the quintessential figure embodying the forces of evil in West-ern metaphysics was incorporated into native cosmological schemes.

In his analysis of devil beliefs in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, Taussig argues that the devilis intimately connected with the process of proletarianization:

Male plantation workers ometimes make secret contracts with the devil [by hiding a mufeco in a fieldat work] n order o increase productivity, nd hence their wage. Furthermore, t is believed that theindividual who makes he contract s likely o die prematurely nd in great pain. [Taussig 980:94]

According to Taussig, these contracts are not made in peasant forms of production-in, for

example, situations in which peasants either farm their own land or work for other peasants-and women, even when engaged in proletarian labor, do not make such contracts at all (Taussig1980:97). He maintains that it is only as former peasants become landless wage laborers, work-

ing on sugar plantations or in the Bolivian mines, that the devil assumes such importance inthe consciousness of the rural underclasses. Taussig (1980:17) "reads" such devil-lore as a folk

critique of capitalist production and suggests that the culture of these neophyte proletarians is

antagonistic to the process of commodity formation and the rationalization of economic life.

June Nash (1979) provides an account of the ritual offerings that Bolivian tin miners make tothe tio, the devil-like figure whose spirit controls production in the tin mines: these offeringsare made in order to ensure high mineral yields and to prevent fatal mining accidents (Nash1979:122). According to Nash, if the tfo is not fed he will "eat" the men who work in the mines,claiming their lives through work-related "accidents." As is the case with the Cauca Valleydevil, the devil who rules the Bolivian tin mines is frequently bent on death, and his victims are

always male. However, Nash does not "read" the miners' offerings to the tio as an indigenouscritique of wage labor. Instead, she maintains that the miners' perceptions of the tio are ambi-

valent, since the tio is capable of generative as well as destructive acts. Nash focuses on the

way in which these work rituals maintain a certain continuity with the past, for the tfo is a

complex image that combines characteristic features of pre-Hispanic spiritual beings with qual-ities of the Christian devil. By reinforcing a shared sense of history, Nash argues, such ritualsfoster solidarity and thus help to combat the alienation workers feel in the work setting (Nash1979:319-320, 325-330).

Parsons' 1945ethnographic study

of theneighboring

Ecuadoreancommunity

ofPeguchealso provides pertinent insights into the traditional peasant cosmology. Parsons indicates that

indigenous peasants regarded construction sites as ominous settings and felt that individuals

laboring at these sites were vulnerable to attack by malevolent spirits known as duendes (cf.Harris 1980). These spirits were associated with all work projects involving a transformation ofthe landscape, such as the construction of a bridge or an irrigation canal. Exerting a controllingpower over the work, duendes had to be propitiated with ritual offerings so that the projectmight reach completion. Like the tio of the Bolivian mines, the duendes often hungered forhuman blood. Describing the construction of a bridge over the Guachala River, Parsons

(1945:215) notes that the duende asked the engineer and boss to give him men and women,tools and animals. In order to be allowed to

completethe

bridge, theyhad a

youngIndian

daylaborer hrow into mid-river "six combos (stonemason's hammers), twelve new-handled shov-

els, twelve crowbars, twelve picks, [and] two sheep," and "during the work on the bridge two

young men died." It is not entirely clear from Parsons' reading whether these young men wereoffered as a sacrifice, along with the tools, or whether they died "accidentally" because the

offering was insufficient. Subsequent information tends to support the latter explanation. Ineither case, Parsons' description provides recent historical perspectives from which to analyze



10/24

the Quimsa material, since in all three Quimsefo stories, the devil's possession of male workersoccurs in association with a transformation of the landscape dictated by the new economic

requirements of local commercial farmers. Applying the logic of Parsons' analysis to the casein question here, we might argue that for the Quimsehos, the recent deaths of male workersalso have a cosmological basis. They are the result of the wrath of the spirit world, directed

against present conditions of capitalist production-conditions in which construction proceedsat an unbridled rate and human reciprocity with both the land and the spirits is no longerdeemed important (cf. Bastien 1978).

Ong's (1987) account of factory women in Malaysia who are possessed by demons on the

shopfloors of transnational electronics corporations helps to illuminate the present case andalso presents important points of contrast. These incidents of spirit possession also occur in thework setting; however, the victims are not men but young female workers. Workers relate at-tacks of spirit possession to their belief that many of the sites of modern Malay factories are

haunted, dirty, and conducive to "pollution." As is the case in Quimsa, production schedulesin the

Malayfactories are often

disrupted bythese

spiritattacks.

Ong"reads" the

imagery ofspirit possession as factory women's unconscious protest against the form male authority takesin the gender-structured workplace. Such imagery also reflects their sense of dislocation in a

kampung (Malay village) society that is being radically restructured by global market forces

(Ong 1987:201-213).The contemporary Quimsa narratives reveal that cases of devil possession have not occurred

in association with peasant forms of production. This dovetails with Taussig's (1980) findingsabout the devil compact in the Cauca Valley. By way of contrast, however, the present caseindicates that devil-lore was an important element of peasant discourse about class relationsand ethnicity before the advent of wage labor and proletarian production. Findings from this

case push the critical significance of the devil-lore back in time and suggest that the local devilwas initially a mercantilist one. Unlike Taussig's proletarians, who had once been an indepen-dent landholding peasantry, the Quimsa peasants have had a lengthy historical relationshipwith a superior landowning class that appropriates peasant labor. This asymmetrical relation-

ship has provided the materials necessary for the construction of a subaltern discourse in whichthe devil emerges as a central figure. As early as 1850 the bulk of all available land in the parishwas monopolized by a few large estates, and peasants gained usufruct rights to this land byperforming various obligatory services. Although a peasant labor force produced grains,cheeses, and woven cloth on local haciendas for the capitalist market as well as for householduse, social relations at the point of production were not capitalist in form, and hacienda labor-ers, who still had access to land, could not be considered part of a rural proletariat Crain 1989).Servile relations of production remained in effect on the large estates until the local agrarianreform in the early 1960s. This reform abolished all existing forms of nonwage labor on the

large estates and required proprietors to give their former tenants legal title to small plots ofland.

In the peasant lore of the labor tenancy period, the devil image marked the landed elite as aparticular group and fostered an awareness of the social differentiation separating their way oflife from that of the peasantry. In Quimseio oral histories the boundaries of the Hacienda LaMiranda are often referred to as the route traveled by the devil, and particular areas inside theestate, such as La Cocha, are said to be haunted. Several women told me that even

priorto the

construction of the one-lane public road in 1940, peasants returning from the Ibarra marketsome 17 kilometers away would always make sure that they got past La Cocha before 5:00p.m. If they could not get past by that time, they would wait to return home the following day.According to one woman, if you crossed this area during la mala hora (the wrong hours of theday) devil-like bulls stuffed with money would appear before your very eyes. Implicit in thisassociation of the devil with hacienda geography is the notion that the hacienda's boundaries



11/24

mark a realm distinct from the community of Quimsa peasants, a realm of undomesticatednature and of the supernatural.

In other historical narratives the devil is associated with peasant ideas about the colonialelite, hacienda production, and buried treasure. This image is constructed as antithetical to

Quimseio concepts of reciprocity and proper personhood. Peasant discourse about the devilin oral histories often contains implicit critiques of class relations, which peasants level againstboth the traditional landlords and hacienda production in general. One commonly reportednarrative refers to the Hacienda El Cisne, located along the southern border of Quimsa and

formerly owned by the religious order of La Merced. According to this story, the members ofthis order were rich men who, not content with accumulating silver and gold (which they bur-ied on their property), also kept a large store of Inca ceremonial jars. One version of the storyholds that

in the time of the Church Fathers, fyou saw a fire burning nattended n a moonless night at ElCisne,it was a sure sign hat he devil was there, and the only thing he could be doing was burning hat money.And here was a little izard, and she was always here near he fire. She was the guardian, aring or he

money. Now a local man [a peasant] ooked out and saw a fire burning ne night, unattended, nd heknew hat his was a sign that here must be money here. This man was acquisitive, wanting o get themoney or himself as the Church Fathers ad done, even though he knew hat his was evil and that hedevil must be there. So the next night he went alone to dig up the money. He found the lizard sittingnear he spot where the fire had burned he night before. As he was digging, his pick ax began o ring,and this ringing was the sound of the gold coins that were buried deep in the earth. But his man wasbad, trying o take this money all by himself, and the next day he was stricken by a terrible ever romwhich he never recovered.

This narrative draws attention to the power of the invisible world that the devil inhabits, and itscentral themes are of envidia and danger. It warns that, although this treasure is known to all,evil will befall anyone who attempts to uncover and appropriate it. One version of this storyends with the

provisothat it is

acceptablefor

peasantsto

goand

dig upthe Inca

jars,as the

jarsare part of their Indian patrimony, but that the remaining treasure must not be disturbed. Thus,the accumulative tendencies that characterized the lifestyle of traditional landlords are re-

jected. This oral history has important similarities to Lucho's story of devil possession, but italso departs from that story in several ways. Unlike Lucho, the protagonist of this narrative isnot a known figure but an anonymous person. However, the protagonist is again a male subjectin a solitary state who is lured by the possibility of acquiring wealth. This male figure becomesthe focal point of community attention. The narrative is related to a whole corpus of folk leg-ends from this region that chastise the kind of greed and profiteering that can threaten the wel-fare of an entire community.

Both this narrative and Lucho'sstory

can beanalyzed

inlight

of the"decentering

of the

subject" and privileging of the social that Jameson (1981:124-125) finds particularly charac-teristic of "magical narratives." Such preindividualistic narratives "emerge from a social worldin which the psychological subject has not yet been constituted as such" and in which thedistinction between public and private experience frequently does not exist. Unlike the nar-rative describing buried treasure, which more closely corresponds to the genre of magical nar-

ratives, Lucho's story recounts the plight of a "centered subject," an individual perilously be-

yond the influence of the "social." Lucho violates various community norms, such as not work-

ing at night, and as a result of his obsession with work, he becomes still further disconnectedfrom the community. Lucho's story also bears messages of conflicting sign-systems. Jameson

(1981:95) regardssuch conflicts as traces or

anticipationsof different modes of

production.On

the one hand, Lucho's story, like the tale of buried treasure, is the product of a world of pre-capitalist meanings, where magical spirits still play a vital role in constituting reality and peas-ant "common sense" does not assign heavy machinery and wage work an entirely taken-for-

granted status. However, Lucho's story is also derived from a social world in which peasantlabor has become more fully commoditized and capitalism has increasingly eroded the olderforms of collective life. While I would argue that Lucho's body, positioned alone by the ma-



12/24

chine, indexes the emergence of commodity reification as the new hegemonic tendency in thelocal scene, these stories of devil possession, and the peasant women who occupy their mar-gins, figure as a central metaphor for collective concerns. In their efforts to pull men away fromthe work site, peasant women are the decentered subjects who bear traces of a precapitalistmode of apprehending the world. Their stories express the women's desire for change and forthe restoration of forms of associational life.

peasant cosmology, the labor process, and Western technology

In the traditional cosmology of Quimsa, the devil manifested itself in many different forms.Local peasants held that the spirit of the devil could temporarily enter both animate and inan-imate objects, and a person who encountered these objects could become ill or susceptible tothe devil's control. For example, several informants explained that the devil could momentarilyenter and leave waterfalls and irrigation canals. They also explained that the devil could assumethe form of an animal-a bull, a lizard, a black dog-or of a person, known or unknown, suchas an abandoned infant crying in the road. Just as the traditional cosmology posited that thedevil could enter irrigation canals, peasants today believe that he can penetrate newly intro-duced Western commodities (cf. Gottlieb 1986). Thus, individual deaths that are related insome way to the use of heavy machinery, to construction, or to wage work are described as thedevil's handiwork.

For the QuimseRo peasantry, large machinery and heavy equipment (tractors, bulldozers,harvesters, sawmills) are symbols of capitalist farming. These peasants had rarely encounteredany type of heavy machinery before the 1940s, when equipment was first imported by multi-national firms such as International Harvester and John Deere. Over the next three decadesfarm operations were progressively mechanized. Commenting on the arrival of the first big ma-chines, one hacienda owner explained that since these machines represented a large capitalinvestment, estate owners usually brought in skilled employees from outside the region to op-erate them. This pattern has continued into the present period. As a result, many local peasantsremain somewhat bewildered by such machinery and frequently attribute its inner workings tothe devil. Gender differences are also significant with respect to machinery. While male peas-ants have in the course of their everyday work gained a nominal familiarity with heavy equip-ment, female peasants know almost nothing about the technology used on the estates and bydevelopment teams (cf. Boserup 1970; Etienne and Leacock 1980). Moreover, heavy machin-ery is rarely used in peasant forms of production. In contrast to the

neighboring parishes,where

large peasant cooperative farms were formed after the 1960s agrarian reform, in Quimsa themajority of peasants have title to land only in the form of smallholding units. Most of these plotsare either too small or on too steep an incline to allow use of heavy machinery. In addition,many peasants lack the money necessary to rent such machinery.

Peasants associate the new machinery with the devil and often regard hese products of West-ern technology as an unnecessary evil. Perhaps this negative assessment will become clear ifwe examine it in light of its broader sociohistorical context. First, mechanization has under-mined the need for the peasants' labor on many of the large estates of the parish and has dealta deadly blow to their traditional means of livelihood. Second, as peasants lose their employ-ment

opportunities theyfear the loss of other

perquisites,such as the

rightto rent

pasture spaceand to draw upon the patron's name and fame as a form of symbolic capital-perquisites whichare, in one way or another, tied to local wage work. Finally, changes in the material conditionsof life have had profound effects on the structure of household relations, and they have forcedindividual peasants, particularly men, to migrate in search of work.

Rumors about efforts to further mechanize commercial farm operations fueled peasant dis-cussions during the lengthy period of political mobilization that arose in 1983 (Crain 1988,



13/24

1989). Those involved frequently referred o the peasant invasion of the neighboring HaciendaEl Cisne some ten years earlier, when disgruntled workers and unemployed peasant youths had

reportedly vandalized or stolen various items of machinery. Local commercial farmers are quiteaware that mechanization has become a volatile political issue, and they fear the possibility ofcollective action on the part of a peasant labor force displaced by further mechanization. Thisfear is surely one of the factors informing their recent decision not to introduce imported milk-

ing machines, as these would eliminate a number of jobs presently held by peasant milkmaids.

(Milking is one of the areas in which the female labor force is concentrated.) To date there is

only one commercial farm in the parish, a rather small one, that has installed milking machines.There is a large body of historical and contemporary literature hat gives evidence of a similar

antipathy on the part of agricultural aborers to the new machinery that frequently accompaniescapitalist expansion in the agricultural sector. During the 1830s, for example, proletarians inthe English countryside organized the "Captain Swing" uprisings, demanding an end to the

spread of mechanization that had led to their unemployment and increasing pauperization(Hobsbawm and Rude 1969). Gaining a reputation as "machine-breakers," these men de-

stroyed harvesters and threshing machines as well as other agricultural equipment being rented

by the large proprietors. In his study of worker opposition to new technology, James Scott(1985:248-249) notes that the word "sabotage," frequently used to refer to the wrecking of

machinery, can be traced to a case of 19th-century French workers who threw their sabots, orwooden clogs, into the works.

While both male and female peasants in Quimsa often reject mechanization, at the level ofthe household it is women who determine which new products of Western technology will be

accepted and which rejected. Constituting units of production and consumption, householdsare the most important economic institutions in Quimseio peasant society, and today it is pri-marily women who are responsible for managing the household economy and for cultivatingeach household's subsistence plot. Many women feel the seductive appeal of new commoditiesthat claim to alleviate domestic drudgery, and they are also involved in everyday practices that

ultimately reproduce the development process. However, peasant women also profess a cer-tain ambivalence about purchased products. For example, while visiting me one day, Rosa

spotted a package of instant Maggi soup on my shelf and remarked that such a product was

"dangerous." Initially I thought her remark alluded to the possibility that packaged soups mightbe harmful to one's health since they contain chemical preservatives. However, I discoveredlater that she feared these products because she felt she might grow to depend on them. Such

products are constantly evaluated in light of the greater reliance on the cash economy that theyentail. The loss of household

autonomythat results from new

practicesof

consumptionwas

particularly apparent during the spring of 1983, when inflationary pressures and hoardingdrove the prices of many store-bought goods higher. At this point many peasant women soughtto restrict their household expenditures to a minimum and, where possible, to rely on theirsubsistence production. Such practices constitute an everyday form of resistance, designed tolimit the intrusions of the market economy.

gender, politics, and heretical discourse

In stories toldby

femalepeasants,

accusations both ofenvy

and of devilpossession

link maleworkers with the capitalist farm economy. Yet these beliefs are not shared across cultural andclass boundaries. Instead, most commercial farmers whom I interviewed tended to dismissthem as pure nonsense and peasant superstition. Two large landowners even professed that

they had had a personal hand in banishing witchcraft and occult practices from the parish.While large farmers have worked in conjunction with other dominant institutions (such as the

Ministry of Health and the Catholic church) to eradicate native traditions of healing and witch-



14/24

craft, their actual social practices often conflict with their professed views. Several female peas-ants told me, for example, that they had been responsible for healing particular landlords ininstances in which Western medicine had not proved effective. Similarly, Guerrero's study(1982) of peasant-commercial farmer relations in the neighboring parish of Otavalo reveals thatcommercial farmers have recently had dealings with shamans from that area. In Otavalo a pros-perous commercial farmer whose estate had been invaded by peasants from several nearbycommunities sought a reputed shaman in order to bewitch the peasant invaders, hopingthereby to regain control of what he considered "his" land. While not a believer himself, theestate owner was aware of the powerful hold that this particular shaman had on the local pop-ulation. Rumors of bewitchment, circulated by the farmer's henchmen, might induce peasantsto abandon the contested terrain.

Given a social climate that generally tries to repress such occult beliefs, Quimseno talk aboutdevil possession or about seeing a shaman forms part of a suppressed, underground discourse(cf. Favret-Saada 1980; Price 1983; Taussig 1987). During the course of my fieldwork, for ex-

ample, I never once heard devil possession discussed in public. Instead, it was discussed in-

formally, in private conversations among women; communal laundering, embroidering circles,and healing sessions, in particular, drew the women together and served as important channelsof communication for the entire community. In such settings the women frequently criticizedthe conditions of wage work on nearby commercial farms. Harding's study of a northern Span-ish village directs attention to the way in which peasant women make strategic use of theirverbal skills to shape public opinion and alter power relations in a community. Analyzing wom-en's lack of access to institutional power, Harding argues that women's tongues are their mostimportant weapons and that "in gossiping, women are behaving politically because they aretampering with power.... Gossip is potentially a challenge to the male hierarchy" (Harding1975:302-303).

Talk about the devil in Quimseia women's informal groups was always marked by a changein intonation and prefaced by such comments as "reserve this" or "let's keep this between youand me." The decentralized and scattered nature of such groups grants them a veil of secrecy,making it difficult for the dominant groups to monitor them. But the privatization of this kindof talk is also the result of powerful ideological sanctions, as there has been a forceful campaignby members of the local dominant class as well as representatives of state ministries to silencediscourses of this kind (cf. Portelli 1981).

While claims about devil possession may appear to the reader to be the wild fantasies ofhysterical women, I must also point out that even the sheriff took them seriously. Appointed tohis position by important political figures from outside the community, the sheriff was a manof indigenous origins who held several educational degrees and was quite knowledgeableabout local and provincial politics. Upon encountering me one morning several days after thediscovery of Lucho's body, he asked what rumors were circulating in Quimsa regarding thedeath. I told him that some people were suggesting that it might have been caused by devilpossession. Instead of dismissing this idea, he admitted that he also thought devil possessionmight be the cause. At the same time, however, he argued that as an upholder of "the law" hecould accord this answer "no weight," as there was no way the law could prove or disprovethe existence of a pact with the devil. "In the eyes of the law," he commented, "there must bewitnesses. But how can we have witnesses who can attest to the devil's machinations?"

AlthoughI had

initiallywondered

whyBarbara and Rosa had decided not to confront Lu-

cho's boss with "their version" of Lucho's death, I eventually came to see their behavior as acalculated act (cf. Price 1983). These women kept their talk semisecret because, they said, therewas nothing to be gained by openly charging the owners of nearby commercial farms with evil.Their behavior calls to mind James Scott's (1985:25-26) remarks about the "onstage" and"offstage" behavior of Malaysian peasants in a highly unequal agrarian class structure. Scottfinds that the peasants often defer to members of the elite and take care not to speak dispar-



15/24


16/24

fenders of native tradition" against colonial incursions, even though this shadow society hadto maintain an "underground existence," shielded from colonial surveillance. While Indianmen were forced to occupy the interface between local community and colonial society, par-ticipating in obligatory corvee labor and assuming positions as political intermediaries, manynative women could remain faithful to community traditions, serving as moral arbitrators.

Several of the patterns outlined in Silverblatt's analysis of the colonial period are perpetuatedin a new guise today. Contemporary discourses of development in Quimsa, articulated by localcommercial farmers as well as by state institutions, tend to marginalize women's participationin the modernization process. Promoting the acquisition of imported farm machinery, govern-ment loans, and new technical skills, these discourses are primarily addressed to male peasants,who constitute the "proper subjects" of development. Most development agents who visitedQuimsa during 1982-84 promoted community work projects that enlisted the labor of youngmen. Development officials did not-and often still do not-ask women to identify with their

programs and step into the modern world in the same manner as they did men. In several ofthe community meetings I attended, members of development teams and certain local menmade various derogatory remarks about women, including statements to the effect that womencame to these meetings only to gossip among themselves, knit, or nurse their babies. Womenwere obviously present at these meetings, but they tended to voice their opinions less frequentlythan men did. Why was this the case? There are various ways in which development agenciesdiscourage women's participation. For example, knowledge of oral and written Spanish hasbecome increasingly important for communicating with the state institutions that administerthe majority of the development funds; however, Spanish literacy rates are lower for womenthan for men and, in addition, more women are monolingual Quichua speakers.

But I would also argue that in certain instances, women's silence or refusal to speak in thepresence of outsiders is a positive act of resistance. Peasant women in Quimsa see male peas-ants as more ready than they to collaborate with "the outside," often without fully consideringthe implications of such collaboration. Such an argument dovetails with Silverblatt's (1980)finding that it was native women who were often assigned the task of maintaining communitysecrets and shielding Andean traditions from colonial surveillance. It also parallels my obser-vation that indigenous women strategically avoid discussing devil possession with outsidersand nonpeasants. The following case illustrates my point. In April 1983 several women accusedthe acting vice-president of Quimsa, a man named Caesar Pilas, of revealing community secretsand of jeopardizing the political interests of the majority of Quimsenos. This man had tapedthe minutes of a recent community meeting in which Quimsefnos discussed the feasibility of

takingover the Hacienda La Miranda. This

meetinghad been held at

night,with outsiders and

persons of superior social status excluded from attendance. The following Saturday, threewomen found Caesar drunk in a corner of the community football field, his cassette-playerblaring out the meeting's heated discussion. These women were horrified to see that the ad-ministrator of the hacienda had stopped to chat with someone and was within hearing rangeof Caesar's broadcasting. Later, Caesar was overheard alluding to the meeting in a conversationwith one of the hacienda's foremen. Immediately, attacks on his behavior began to circulate inwomen's gossip networks. He was socially ostracized, accused of being careless and of servingas a spy for the patron, and eventually denounced publicly-by women-in community meet-ings. Caesar was eventually forced to resign from his position as vice-president of the com-

munity, largelyas a result of

politics and power struggles originating in women's domestic do-mains.That women's silence in the presence of outsiders does not always imply passivity but may

instead be a deliberate strategy became readily apparent to me at other points, too. Many timesI saw women feign ignorance when questioned by external authorities making brief visits to thecommunity. In several cases I knew that a particular woman was knowledgeable about thetopic of inquiry and might well have answered the question, but heard her respond instead: "I



17/24

don't know about these things, senor. You will have to ask my husband." Usually the husbandwas conveniently away at the time.

Women's discourse about the devil is a counterdiscourse to the authoritative statements re-

garding modernization marshalled on behalf of commercial farming interests. This counterdis-course runs alongside, and at times converges with, a male political language of class (cf. JoanScott 1988). The focus here on women's voices should not be understood to imply that malepeasants are fully complicit with existing class relations and the emerging forms of capitalistdevelopment that have appeared in the parish. While a thorough discussion of all the forms of

political opposition male peasants have pursued is beyond the scope of the present article, itmust be emphasized that they have often constructed their own critical views (Crain 1989,1990). Male critical discourse is expressed more readily in formal political arenas, both insideand outside the community, while women's critical discourse, which also has political dimen-

sions, appears more frequently in informal and clandestine settings (cf. Harris 1980).However, one result of men's exodus in search of work has been an increase in women's

participation n public assemblies and their nomination to formal positions of power at the locallevel, thus promoting new constructions of "male" and "female" (cf. Harris 1980).'0 Whilemen still hold the majority of official leadership positions in the community, at the level of

everyday practice it is women who are actually representing the community in the public do-main. Despite the fact that certain development agencies persist in ignoring this shift, it is nottoo extreme to speak of a feminization of the community as a whole. As men have moved out,they have come to depend on women to sustain their membership in the community (cf. Rogers1975).

Women's symbolic power in the community has traditionally resided in their positions ashealers and witches, and more recently they have begun directing this power toward the po-litical arena, albeit in a coded form. Although devil possession per se was never openly dis-cussed in the formal political meetings I attended, both men and women used the devil idiomto refer to the local patron, the owner of the nearby Hacienda La Miranda. Female peasantsoften avoided pronouncing the patron's name in public and referred to him simply as a cuco,or devil-like figure. Several of the most vocal participants during the political mobilization of1983 were women who were respected healers, midwives, and witches. In one of these polit-ical meetings, a senior woman and noted curer compared the coming of the large-scale ma-

chinery purchased by the commercial farmers o the arrival of the mata-doctores (killer-doctors)of the Western medical tradition. She emphasized that her only doctor was the nettle, a com-mon medicinal plant, which she could use perfectly well by herself or with the aid of anothercurandera. Women who

occupy positionsas witches and healers have been

regardedas

"threatening" and as "troublemakers" by development teams and contemporary commercialfarmers.11 Campaigns to wipe out these folk practitioners by replacing them with various formsof Western medicine have a lengthy history in the parish. Positioned at the margins of the struc-tures of global capitalism, these women are, I would argue, in a privileged position to launcha critique of the modernization process.

gender relations and the contours of recent material change

In the preceding pages, I have argued that the Quimsena women's stories provide us with a

critiqueof

existingclass relations and that women have

representedthe new economic

systemin a negative light. In this section I examine the differential impact of capitalist expansion onmen and women (cf. Deere 1977). I begin by introducing information about women's experi-ence of material change, information that should help to explain the gender-specific oppositionexpressed in these accounts.

The traditional tenancy system, which prevailed on the estates through the early 1960s, wasbased on the labor power of the entire peasant family. Women worked alongside men in ag-



18/24

riculture, and they predominated in milking and domestic service. On the large farms today,however, women are generally excluded from agricultural abor. Their exclusion is largely theresult of two related trends. First, there has been a reduction in the number of employmentopportunities in the agricultural sector as a whole because of a shift to commercial dairying,which is less labor-intensive. Second, much of the production in the reduced agricultural sector

has been mechanized, and estate owners have hired only men to fill the remaining positions.Capitalist relations of production ideologically constitute female laborers as "helpmates"

and part-time workers who are subordinate to men. As under traditional tenancy relations,women today are expected to play a supporting role and to assist the male head of householdin carrying out certain aspects of his wage work. Women's labor is accorded less value thanmen's and so women receive less pay for their work. Moreover, the majority of female laborersdo not receive any fringe benefits such as medical insurance or social security pensions. Hold-

ing 85 percent of the positions at the Hacienda La Miranda, male workers are more fully inte-

grated into the commercial farm economy than are women. Furthermore, only men occupythose positions of authority, such as overseer, that are particularly mportant n the reproductionof the hierarchical class structure.

Work defines who a man is, and today it is primarily "wage work" that is a crucial elementin the construction of masculine identity. Although Quimsena women seem to work all the

time, it is men's work that is socially defined as "real work" and as crucial to family survival.A woman's identity is defined primarily in terms of her relations to others, to kin and commu-

nity, and her work is perceived to be a derivative of these relations. The greater valorization ofthe male worker, attested to by his ability to attain high positions in the work hierarchy and toearn fringe benefits denied to the female worker, promotes a male identification with the com-mercial farm enterprise that many women lack. Estate owners as well as peasant overseers tendto view female workers with a certain degree of suspicion and skepticism. The commercialfarmers whom I interviewed complained that they had greater problems with their female laborforce. I was told that the milkmaids in particular were noted for their lack of work-discipline,their tardiness, and their tendency to "talk back" on the job.

During the past ten years women's dependence on wage earnings from the local dairy farmshas declined while men's has stayed relatively constant. This change is due in part to the com-mercialization of women's artisanal production. While women have traditionally embroidered

clothing and other items for use in the home, they are now producing embroidered goods forsale in extralocal markets as well.12 Many women combine artisanal production with part-timewage work on commercial farms, but they are frequently able to earn more cash by selling theirembroidered

goodsthan

by dairyingor domestic work. Indeed, the income

they generatefrom

artisanal production sometimes surpasses that of male peasants who work as common day la-borers.13 Artisanal production allows these women a certain degree of flexibility and controlover the pace of their work, and because such production is based in the home, it is compatiblewith child care and the completion of women's other domestic chores (cf. Nash 1986).

As the lowest paid and the first to be reassigned to new positions, many women accord theirpart-time wage work a very low priority. I often heard remarks such as "If I can make twice asmuch by embroidering a tablecloth, why should I worry about showing up for work at milkingtime?" Milking demands punctuality, and male overseers are often frustrated when upstartmilkmaids fail to appear at the appropriate hour. While the women's stories examined hereassociate

the figure of the devil with commercial farming, on the commercial farms womenthemselves are frequently accused of being the devil's accomplices. The overseer of the LaCocha milk station charged peasant milkmaids with bewitching him as well as the livestock ofthe Hacienda La Miranda. Arriving one morning at the milk station, he found voodoo dolls inthe cows' feed troughs and immediately held the milkmaids suspect. Not wanting to touchthese items himself, he ordered the women to get rid of them at once. One milkmaid who hadbeen privy to all this told me: "We laughed, and while the overseer was busy inspecting several



19/24

newborn calves we took the voodoo dolls and cast them into the Calina, a nearby lake." It isbelieved that magical spells cast on items thrown into this lake cannot be cancelled, for thelake is reputed to have no bottom and, therefore, no end. Such practices undermine the fore-man's ability to maintain order in the workplace, and they have a disruptive effect on dairyproduction in general (cf. Ong 1987). One foreman, furious with the chaos that rumors of be-

witchment had created in the workplace, was reported to have said that he would prefer thatno women work in dairying.

The new economic possibilities provided by the sale of their artisanal products have affordedwomen a semiautonomous space within which to criticize commercial dairy production.Women's ability to secure a measure of independence from the work regimen of the commer-cial farm contrasts sharply with the male peasants' increasing subjugation to wage work and itsdeleterious consequences. In the narratives presented here, it is women who attempt to pullmen away from wage work and to protect them from the dangers it poses. The peasant "ima-

ginary" of daydreams and nightmares, repeatedly evoked in these stories, is haunted by these

unsettling images of the devil figure who dominates wage work. Women's opposition to thenew cultural values, patterns of work-discipline, and standards of consumption consonant withthe new mode of production are confirmed by these stories and by the supporting evidence ofseveral examples. In the first story, women's opposition to both the lengthening of the workdayand the accelerated rate of wage work is registered in Lucho's constant preoccupation with hiswork. In this text, Lucho's body and spirit become, in essence, mere appendages of the sawmillmachine. In the third narrative, women's objections to new standards of work-discipline andto the form male authority takes in the workplace are evinced when the protagonist, AlbertoEscola, stops working at the construction site and encourages fellow laborers to do the same.He refuses to be that labor power which capital requires. Finally, women's everyday acts of

resistance, exemplified by their rejection of Maggi's soup and other store-bought products,demonstrate their ability to hold off new patterns of consumption.

While a successful hegemonic capitalist project ultimately requires the remaking of peasantsubjectivity, so that peasants come to regard the wage form as "natural" and wage work as "a

calling," these stories construct images of the commoditization of labor that equate wage workwith spiritual impoverishment, often leading to physical illness or death (cf. Foucault 1980;Ong 1987; Taussig 1980:22).14 Each telling of these stories becomes a political act in whichwomen project their concerns about the preservation of life and the destiny of their communitywhile simultaneously negating the dominant meanings assigned to wage work (cf. Franco1985). Another common thread running through these narratives s their opposition to capital-ism's radical

reshapingof the natural

landscape,a

reshapingthat conflicts with Andean cos-

mological schemes that assert the unity of persons, spirits, and nature and seek to maintain a

"reciprocal balance" between them (cf. Bastien 1978; Nash 1979). Under capitalist relationsof production this balance has been distorted, as nature has become a commodity, pried loosefrom the norms of reciprocity and increasingly subjected to human domination and rationalcontrol.15 For he tellers of these tales of devil possession, this constant making-over of the land-

scape-this enclosing and privatizing of forests and pastures, this paving of roads and buildingof bridges-has been a harbinger of death.

conclusions

The devil narratives discussed here reflect a confrontation between the Quimsefo peasants'moral economy and an expanding global economy. They should be read as allegories that, intelling stories about the deaths of individual male workers, are in fact foretelling the impendingdeath of an entire way of life. They portray the decentering of the hierarchical peasant worldand the installing of a new cultural order in which the logic of commodity production reigns



20/24

supreme and in which material objects wax large and people small-or, in Rosa's idiom, inwhich "persons [such as Lucho] are often sacrificed for things."

By focusing on the different "versions" of Lucho's death, I have demonstrated the complexityof local social reality, a reality in which multiple causation is frequently invoked to explainevents. Furthermore, by examining the various versions, I have, I hope, illuminated the waysin which peasant ideology and politics are constructed and have pointed to conflicting inter-pretations of the development process. I have argued that aspects of peasant cosmology, as wel Ias class and gender ideologies, are inscribed in these accounts and work to resist the processof commodification. Peasant spirits, such as the devil, and cosmological beliefs about inaus-

picious places and times of day haunt workers and their respective work sites. Such cosmolog-ical impulses disrupt work-discipline and wreak havoc in the workplace. Following Ong(1987), I argue that these spirit attacks can be viewed as an unconscious form of political resis-tance to the new material conditions of life associated with commercial farming.

While I have focused on contemporary devil-lore, I have also traced this cultural form backin time and shown that the devil served as an idiom for talking about local class relations underthe labor tenancy system. In contrast to the Cauca Valley devil-lore, which Taussig (1980) in-

terprets as a critique of wage labor, the Quimsa devil-lore stands as a broad critique of class

domination, whether by the hacienda landlords of the past or the commercial farmers of the

present.This analysis argues for an expanded definition of "the political," a definition that includes

both conscious and unconscious forms of resistance generated initially in women's informaldomains. It insists that we cannot ignore the gender dimension that shapes the production ofthis counterdiscourse about the devil. I have drawn attention to the ways in which gender con-structs politics-and vice versa-by underscoring the fact of women's marginalization in therealm of official political discourse, and I have demonstrated women's construction of an al-ternative political language. Focusing on women's statements of resistance in discourse as wellas women's everyday acts of resistance to both commercial farming and Western styles of de-

velopment, this article demonstrates that female peasants in semiprivate contexts confront pub-lic issues-namely, the politics of the workplace.

It seems appropriate that it is women, and not men, who are the storytellers and who launchthis powerful critique, since women have not been drawn into the world of wage work and the

development process to the extent that men have. Women's presence on the land and in the

community, at a time when large numbers of men have migrated out, moreover, puts female

peasants in an ideal position for communicating these concerns about the changes in life

wrought by wagework. Thus women, who derive their

primarysense of

identityfrom their

relations to others and who serve as cultural mediators between the living and the dead, tellthese stories about the deaths of significant others, deaths that have taken a dramatic toll on lifein the community. Past and present evidence suggests that dominant groups have tended to

represent peasant women themselves as witchlike or as in league with the devil. In the narra-tives described here, then, women are turning the discourse of the dominant group back onitself.

Articulated by female artisans who occupy the margins of the larger global economy, and

provoked by the encounter between "our world" and theirs, these stories also direct their crit-ical gaze toward us (cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986; Taussig 1980, 1987). They speak, if indi-

rectly,to

problemsfaced

byadvanced

capitalistsocieties in the industrialized

West,where

spiraling urban growth and ecological crises, not to mention nuclear disasters, threaten ourdaily lives. The women's narratives also challenge those received categories that order andconstitute social reality in the West. Laden with dream imagery and encounters with the "in-visible world," these stories draw on local forms of knowledge that render meaningless thedistinctions between categories such as "the imaginary" and "the real" that are so persistentlymaintained in the West (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Silverman 1983).



21/24

Lucho's death disrupted the taken-for-granted nature of everyday life and called into questionthe routines of wage work. His death called up stories of other deaths, and the ensuing con-versations allowed those who had known him to reflect on larger changes taking place in theirworld. Through these stories and conversations, peasant women were attempting to reshape a

society increasingly menaced by forces perceived as being beyond their control. The storiesare full of public meanings and they speak of collective troubles facing the community.

Today, from amidst the din and hum of mechanized farming, the whirring and buzzing ofthe sawmill turning, emerges the muffled sound of women's voices disrupting attempts to re-define the meaning of work in their community.

notes

Acknowledgments. horter ersions of this article were delivered at the 46th International ongress fAmericanists eld in Amsterdam n July 1988 and at the 87th annual meeting of the American Anthropo-

logicalAssociation eld in

Phoenix, Arizona,n November 1988. The article s based on fieldwork nder-

taken n the community fQuimsa n the northern ighlands f Ecuador rom anuary 982 through anuary1984. Funding was provided by the Doherty Foundation t Princeton University nd by the Institute fLatinAmerican tudies t the University f Texas at Austin. thank amesBrow, Manuel Delfino, StephanieKane, KristinKoptiuch, Vera Mark, une Nash, and Michael Taussig or helpful comments on earlier ver-sions. In addition, appreciate he comments of the American Ethnologist ditors and anonymous eview-ers. I alone am responsible or the final contents of this article. would like to dedicate t to the memory fmy grandmother, ho was dying when I did this fieldwork.

'This article, written n an experimental ein, is influenced by the New Ethnography, articularly hework of James Clifford n ethnographic riting s allegory. For urther iscussion f this new experimentalmoment n anthropology nd related disciplines, see Clifford 1986a, 1986b) and Marcus and Fischer(1986).

2For urther iscussion of storytelling nd the narrative orm see Bruner 1984), Franco 1989), Lyotard

(1984), Mulvey 1987), Rosaldo 1980), and Taussig 1987).3Games layed n Latin America ither at wakes or during periods of mourning re examined n Harris

(1982), Nash (1979), and Parsons 1945).4Many spects of witchcraft emonstrate marked degree of historical ontinuity. Salomon's nvesti-

gation of the politics of shamanic practice n late-colonial Ecuador ndicates hat dangerous bjects be-witched by native shamans were found "in the doorways, hearths, water sources, and cattle pens of thevictims" 1983:418). According o Salomon 1983:416), such magical objects were often wrapped n apiece of cloth that had belonged o the victim and were referred o as "disease bundles."

5My study of devil possession was, I believe, acilitated yat least wo important actors. First, was closefriends with Barbara nd Rosa. Second, community members were aware hat I myself participated n ac-tivities associated with the occult: many of them knew, for example, hat I had had both myself and myhouse ritually leansed on several occasions.

61n 982, the Hacienda La Miranda orest reserve established en years earlier) ontained 1.5 millioneucalyptus nd pine trees with a total value of 4 million sucres. Tree arming s an important conomicstrategy or many arge estate owners in the parish oday. Land not suitable or agricultural urposes ordairying s frequently edicated o this activity, ince forested and s nontaxable. n addition, ree farmingenables arge armers o prove hat heir and s being used "productively" nd reduces he chances of stateexpropriation n behalf of peasant ommunities. Large armers re quite cognizant of the political mpli-cations of reforestation, or lining heir estates with trees s a sure way to handle "the boundary roblem"and the competing laims of nearby ndian ommunities o this land.

7Black ogs are emblematic f hacienda arming. They are the ominous gatekeepers without whom atraditional acienda would not be complete. Peasants ear hem because of their erocity and their ize.

8Thepresentation f multiple ersions s also a discursive trategy esigned o decenter he authority fthe anthropologist nd move analysis away from univocity, n which the anthropologist ssumes he po-sition of authority y presenting he one "true version" cf. Clifford 986a, 1986b). For discussion of mul-

tiple viewpoints s a discursive trategy n French eminist heory and texts, see Moi (1985) and Irigaray(1985).91 found hat he few men who did talk o me about he local devil fell into a special category f "male-

ness" and shared many "feminine" ttributes. Often physically disabled and/or unemployed, hese fem-inized men were in the home and in the company of women more requently han other men were.

'0Before 960 there was little peasant migration rom he community f Quimsa. Census data rom 1983indicated n increase n the incidence of female-headed ouseholds n the community: f a total of 305households, ome 78, or approximately 6 percent, were headed by women at that ime. These data in-



22/24

Date post:	03-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	da-ar
View:	279 times
Download:	0 times

Poetics and Politics in Ecuadorian Andes

Documents