Witches - Silvia Federici
Witches embodied everything “that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (p. 11). Federici
Federici documents the changes in women’s social status. Federici argues that the witch hunts, rather than representing the last dying breaths of feudal order and the attendant superstitions of feudal societies, were a tool to discipline and shape the emerging working class and hence were integral to the transition to capitalism. Federici concludes that only by ignoring the experience of women, slaves and indigenous people in the transition to capitalism can primitive accumulation be viewed as progressive. As Federici notes, “the witch-hunt grew in a social environment where the ’better sorts’ were living in constant fear of the ’lower classes’” and their potential for insubordination (p. 173).
Federici further argues that “the persecution of the witches was the climax of the state intervention against the proletarian body in the modern era and that the human body was the first machine invented by capitalism” (pp. 143, 146).
Violence
A
- Back to the shamans
- Gods and other beings
- Rites and celebrations
- Witches and witch hunt
- Redemption
- Paganism
- Introduction