From a short book summary my daughter just wrote:

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Michael Taussig’s newest book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America explores the significance of the devil and his relationship to capitalism in South America's mines and plantations. Taussig examines the social history of the plantation workers in western Columbia and the tin mines of Bolivia and takes an in-depth look into their assimilation of the devil within their societies. These societies are currently undergoing proletarinization and are prime examples to study  reactions to capitalism so as to understand and assess  “sacrosanct and unconscious assumptions that are built into and emerge from social forms” (12). He claims that the unnatural features of capitalism have led the new proletarian class i.e., wage earners to use the devil to explain or come to terms with these transformations in their economies. According to Taussig, “the image of the devil, is an image which mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition” (xii). By focusing on the salient features of the contract with the devil, baptism of money, and rite performed to Tio, I hope to communicate these features as critiques to the transformation from a precapitalist to capitalist economy.

In western Columbia plantation workers are said to enter contracts with the devil. These are done in secret and with a sorcerer (95) and are made in order to raise productivity for the worker even though they present great risk to the contractee. Money made through contracts with the devil is said to be “barren” and thus cannot be invested or used as capital (94). This money cannot be used to buy land, livestock, sugarcane, etc., for it is destined to failure and can only be used to buy “luxury items” (94). Only workers who are “engaged in modern proletarian labor on the large capitalist farms” (99) are known to enter into such contracts, while peasants or non-wage earners do not. Why do these particular workers find the need to enter contracts with the devil? Instead of only associating these contracts with crazy folklore or local witchcraft, however, Tuassig begs us to consider “an image illuminating a culture's self-consciousness of the threat posed to its integrity” (96). The threat here is that wage labor, a particular feature of capitalism, is natural, the idea of labor-time as a commodity that can be bought and sold for a price. This commodity of labor has become “natural and immutable, even though it is nothing more than a convention or social construction” (4). Obviously, if this way of life necessitates the devil, they must not think of it as a natural phenomenon. Thus Taussig claims that these plantation workers struggle against this naturalism of capitalism and commodification of labor in their society and contracts with the devil is their justification of their participation in the destructive and exploitive nature of capitalism (38).

In the Cauca valley of Columbia, there exists the belief that if a bill is baptized in place of a child, it will continually return, along with other bills, to its owner. During the supposed baptism of a child, the godparent hides a bill in his hand and thus the bill is baptized instead. Before you release the bill in a sales exchange, a chant is performed (126). A story was told to Taussig of a shopkeeper who opened his cash register and saw two bills fighting. Supposedly, two customers just released their baptized bills at the same time and were waiting to see which would return with the rest of the money  from the register (127). The need to baptize bills highlights the people's belief that they think money does not inherently incur interest, and that “it is seen as so unnatural that supernatural power has to be invoked by the most devious and destructive means” (129).  Also, the child is thought as to have not been baptized and so destined to purgatory (126). The baptism of a bill has to occur in order for money to multiply, which in capitalist society is seen as completely natural. According to Taussig the commodification of an activity like labor, or attributing reproductive properties to money, “cast the fetish into the realm or the unnatural and evil.”

The tin miners of Bolivia worship a benevolent God on the outside, but as soon as they enter the mines they have entered the domain of Tio, or the devil. Each and every mine has its own Tio who has control over the mine, and who is decider over the miners' lives. According to their beliefs, “Without the goodwill of this spirit, effected through ritual, both mineral production and the miners' lives are imperiled.” The miners must please Tio in order to make a productive living and to stay alive. That is the reason they present offerings to him, sacrifice to him, and have even dedicated an entire carnival  to his honor. Interestingly, the offerings to Tio consist of ordinary objects belonging to the miners, such as cigarettes, liquor, herbs, food and coca leaves (148). The miners ask the Tio to protect them from accidents and beg him to “Not eat my blood!” (149). According to tradition the “Miners deserted the ways of the peasant to enter the unnatural economy of wage work” (152). Taussig believes that the Tio is symbolic of colonial and capital transformation. The rites that are performed to Tio illustrate “a clash between use-value and exchange value” (231) and thus a critique of capitalism.