Reddit reviews The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

My first year in the Master's program I took a seminar in Culture and Economy. We had a pretty good stack of books we read through out the semester. I highly recommend these.

Stephen Gudeman- The Anthropology of Economy

Wilk and Cligget- Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology 2nd Ed

Marshall Sahlins- Stone Age Economics

Karen Ho- Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

Colloredo-Mansfeld- The Native Leisure CLass: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes

Nancy Munn- The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society

Michael T. Taussig- The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Taussig is a great writer. Wilk and Cligget's book is good for basic foundations Economic Anthropology. Karen Ho's book is also a great institutional ethnography as well. Happy Reading!

Ok, second stab (not at work... no interruptions): many excellent observations here, much appreciated. I've always harbored a deep prejudice against the horror genre, but I'm beginning to reconsider (I'd love to read Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet). Your comments on it are much appreciated.

>Cosmic Horror, and horror more generally, is often used to facilitate major perspectival shifts in characters who are trapped in a cyclical state of self-identification.

This is quite wonderful, thanks.

Supposing that the circle Ledoux speaks of and the spiral are indeed distinct symbols (a la Nabokov) I think we can assume the malignant circle represents the status quo and the spiral some form of transcendence. [SPOILER](#s "Errol Childress speaks of his imminent ascension") which implies transcendence of the flat circle – perhaps a conical spiral, not unlike the (inverted) one [SPOILER](#s "Cohle hallucinates in Childress' sacrificial dome.") Such a figure is not Nietzschean, as indicated in my previous post. I'm not sure what else to make of it, but between writing that last sentence and this one I've worked through the material at darknessbecomesyou and I am much gratified that the aspects I cared about most seem to have been front and center for Pizzolato and Fukunaga. (I'm so glad they've been so forthcoming.) I am content to let the mythology rest in an indeterminate state. That said, I do think the psychological lens you employ is the most productive: whatever else they may represent, the vicious circle and spiral of transcendence are useful models for conceptualizing the psychodynamics of Hart and Cohle over the course of the narrative.

So having stumbled upon your posts elsewhere, I noticed that you are working on an essay on the construction/subversion of masculinity in TD. I would love—love—to read it when you are finished.

Finally, I have to ask about your comment regarding the pertinence of commodity fetishism. This is a particular interest of mine (in fact I just returned to Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America), but I was surprised to see it in this context. Please say more (or perhaps you were bluffing? No worries either way).

You're focused on action, like Zizek is some cart full of dynamite to be brought into the middle of the town square and blown up to end capitalism.

Yeah, identity is ideology, I am not actually an American, there's nothing inherently American about the colors red, white and blue, blah blah blah but we grow up learning different languages, which from what I hear about Zizek should be very important to him. Wouldn't it make a big difference to him to know that there's a society in south america that has more onomatopoeias than any other language, and wouldn't it be interesting to see how desire is regulated in a society whose relationship to language is different to that of Europe's?

I get that identity is a spook and that you should destroy it but Slavoj's theory is prescriptive, not descriptive. You should destroy identity, not seek to understand why you have this identity. I think that's lazy and short sighted. You want to end identity so soon you don't even want to know what it is. There are whole worlds of identities and power struggles across the planet, wouldn't it be interesting to see how class struggle plays out across them? Like, do you not even know that commodity fetishism in rural columbia takes the form of botched baptismal ritual?

There is just too much variation in the world for Slavoj Zizek. Zizeks' good for westen societies but there's a reason why he writes dense philosophical tomes and not investigative anthropological work.