CALIBAN AND THE WITCH - SILVIA FEDERICI

One time in Madagascar I was drinking with friends of mine, all men who had lived in rural Madagascar most/all of their lives (some of them had lived for a time in a Malagasy city) and I was asking them about this strange event that had occurred the day before. I woke up and went outside to walk to my kitchen. At the time I lived in a room in a family’s house in a town called Ambohitrolomahitsy. Like many Malagasy homes, it sort of rambled and connected in weird ways, a legacy of constant construction and improvement and growth, so in going to the small room that contained both my kitchen and my “shower”, I had to walk outside. During the brief walk I was typically accosted and followed by some of the many chickens that lived on the property, who would watch closely to see if I’d drop any rice. However, on there were no chickens following me. To be clear, there were chickens, as many as there had ever been, maybe 2 dozen, but each of them stood still. Stupefied or paused in a daze. You could wave your hand in front of them, push them over, pick them up. Whatever you wanted. My best friend, Heri, who lived in the house as well, looked around concerned but seemed to have dealt with this before, he asked me to help him gather the chickens and bring him to an old man who come over who was mixing water and a crushed up brick and force-feeding of few spoonfuls the brackish liquid into the mouths of the stunned birds. The chickens were all back to normal by the afternoon. I’d asked what the fuck had happened and my buddy told me it was probably a witch (mpamosavy is the Malagasy word) but he didn’t seem to concerned about it. This seemed strange to me and I asked him if he was going to try to figure out who the witch was. He told me that such a inquisition would be a lot of work and also, who cares, since the chickens were better now. He could tell I thought that was strange then asked if there were witches in the USA and I told him that people used to think so but then they killed everyone they suspected of being a witch and now it’s no longer an issue. He found this really horrifying (quick aside, in Malagasy history there is something known as a Tagena ordeal which involves making someone accused of a crime, typically witchcraft, eat the very poisonous nuts of the Tagena tree to see if they survived as a sort of legal test. Interestingly, there is some evidence that this practice started with people administering the poison to rooster owned by the accused and switched to actually poisoning the person themselves in the 16th century, exactly the time period Federici is writing about). Anyway, this was incredible, best book in a while. Honestly, I’m a little mad I wasn’t asked to read this in college. It was part of a pattern that I’ve noticed in the Social Science world where you don’t read the work but rather dozens of commentaries on said work. I feel like I must have been made to read 2 dozen Foucault responses and critiques but all the Foucault I’ve read has been on my own time. All that’s to say that I had heard about this book for years and thought I understood the general principal, something about how woman and colonial subjects are both oppressed in interlocking ways, but had never read it. Turns out this was a tremendous loss. This book is so clear and insightful about at least 2 subjects that I’ve always found a little “loose” or nebulous, perhaps on the more nonsense-y, woo-woo end of social theory. Namely the book clearly lays out the what the destructions of the commons meant and how it affected history as well as how nascent capitalism constructed modern humans. In the case of the commons, Federici does a great job showing how the destruction of landed commons, i.e. parts of the country that anyone could hunt or live on or tend, coincided with this idea that you would start paying people for specific labor (peasants do get paychecks) as well as the idea that woman’s labor (raising children, cooking, cleaning) wasn’t real labor and that it (woman’s labor) was in fact a sort of commons. Likewise, I’ve always found bio-politics/bio-power stuff a bit too much but Federici does the best job I’ve ever seen with making it clear how labor disciplines bodies into the sorts of disciplined machines that are optimized for production. The short histories of the various groups and movements who opposed this sort of arrangement are engrossing and let you play wistful what-if-they-had-won games in your head. Federici’s point about the sheer scale of the Witch Burnings and how they aren’t a weird throwback quirk in an otherwise enlightened society but a very necessary move in a  campaign to create a very particular type of world, the one we ended up with, is awful to think about. As are the connections between the terror against the New World occupants and the “Witches” of Europe that Federici highlights. Plus there’s lots of cool old woodcuts. Essential. 666 Witches.