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Poetics and Politics in the Ecuadorean Andes: Women's Narratives of Death and Devil Possession Author(s): Mary M.

Crain Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 67-89 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645565 Accessed: 20/04/2009 06:41
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poetics and politics in the EcuadoreanAndes: women's narrativesof death and devil possession

MARY M. CRAIN-University of Barcelona

[I]nspiteof a persistent fiction,we neverwriteon a blankpagebutalwayson one thathasalreadybeen written on.


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

In 1983, in the community of Quimsa, Ecuador, conflicting ideologies and interpretationsof the development process emerged during a period of political mobilization that involved peasants and local commercial farmers in a struggle over land and employment issues. For some three decades, large farmershad been replacing labor-intensive estate production with capitalintensive mechanized agriculture. While significant change had taken place in the social and economic relations of production on the large estates, political unrest during the period of my fieldwork 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 positions 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 mysteriously. Peasant women murmuredthat his death had been caused by devil possession. Subsequently, other stories of devil possession linking male employees to the capitalist farm economy emerged. Articulated by peasant women, this discourse about the devil was also frequently associated with other aspects of the development process, and it became a prominent idiom for talking about material change and the women's opposition to that change. This article examines the political implications of these narrativesabout devil possession. If language is the medium of social practice, then it is through an analysis of language that we can come to understand the ways in which ideologies as well as various forms of politics are constituted (cf. Thompson 1984). Following Foucault (1980:82-83), I will analyze these narratives as a "subjugated discourse" developed in counterpoint to the master-narrativesof development elaborated by state institutions and commercial farmers, narrativesthat promote a

In their recent review of anthropological writing, Marcus and Fischer (1986:8486) have noted that anthropological analyses of political economy tend to neglect issues of cultural meaning. These authors argue that interpretiveanthropology has often elided historical processes and has not always situated its analyses with respect to the broader perspectives of political economy. This article attempts to bridge these concerns by examining narratives recounted by female peasants of highland Ecuador that attribute several recent deaths of male wage laborers to devil possession. Refracted against an expanding global economy, the analysis focuses on the ways in which peasant cosmology and gender and class ideologies are inscribed in these devil narratives and produce meanings that resist the commodification of labor. Throughsuch stories the unofficial voices of peasant women disruptattempts by commercial farmersto redefine the meaning of work under the new relations of production on local estates. [Ecuador, gender, peasant cosmology, politics of domination and resistance, political economy]

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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 the dominant interpretationsand definitions of "the real" (cf. Crain 1989, 1990). My analysis will demonstrate how an ideology of resistance is implicit in this subaltern devil-lore. The women who elaborate these stories become spokespersons for the community, and their specific position will be accounted for and related to these texts. The cultural critique emanating from their accounts belongs to the community as a whole; it is not solely the propertyof women, as male peasants also voice it at times.' The women's narrativesconstitute a form of politics, provided we expand our understanding of "the political" to include various modes of resistance occurring in informal domestic domains. Such domains are often excluded from Western definitions of "the political," which wed it to the formal, public, and visible aspects of social life that are frequently associated with the hierarchical, institutionalized structuresof the state. By assigning all importance to formal political structures, such definitions ignore the more covert dimensions of resistance. This article proceeds by questioning both the hierarchy implicit in the "formal politics" versus "informal politics" distinction and the idea that these entities constitute two closed and separate spheres. This analysis traces the lines of influence connecting private forms of power and resistance to politics exercised in more public arenas. It also explores how the actual practices of 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 progressive subordination of the male worker to the wage form, these stories show how individual men become estranged from their families and communities. For the purposes of the present analysis, these stories will be "read" as collective utterances and not as individual texts.2 This approach 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-interpreteris to reveal the broader social field from which such narrativesemerge. This field includes a series of "semantic horizons" that enable any given text to be situated historically and "rewritten" in terms of the categories of political economy and competing modes of production (cf. Wolf 1982:387). Jameson views all narrativeas informed by a political unconscious, arguing that stories can be regarded as collective and class discourses that are, ultimately, symbolic meditations on "the destiny of community" (Jameson 1981:70).

ethnographic context: unsettling deaths


I was attending my firstfuneral in Quimsa. A hacienda worker named Lucho Sandoval, with whom I had conversed only three days earlier, had died suddenly at a very young age. His was a mysterious death. His body had been found early Saturday morning not too far from my home-at the bottom of a large ravine some 30 meters in depth. The ravine was located on a hillside called Madre de Dios, about half a kilometer from Lucho's home. Lucho had last been seen by two of his compadres (male co-parents) in the afternoon around dusk, and they had thought he was heading toward Madre de Dios. Isat 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 into an open casket. The clothing Lucho had worn on the day of his death was placed inside the casket along with a spoon, a cup, and a bowl, provisions for his sustenance in the afterlife. By early evening, neighbors, friends, and more distant relatives had arrived, bringing food as well as flowers, candles, and wooden images of saints that were placed along both sides of his cas-

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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 the prayersfor the dead and then led the community in singing several Catholic hymns. The singing was interspersed with long wails of lament in Quichua uttered by Lucho's wife, Barbara,and other female relatives, all of whom wept openly. One of Lucho's youngest sons, Carlos, darted in and out through the crowd in order to get closer to his father's casket. While others were busy 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-cooked foods, roasted guinea pigs and steamed potatoes. Enormous helpings of these dishes were served, and bottles of aguardiente (a strong liquor) were freely passed around the room. As the night wore on, many others wept, and the drinking was heavy. Those peasants who grew tired and intoxicated spread their ponchos in a haphazard fashion on the earthen floor, and so a mass 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 the floor and performed pantomimes, pretending to be various animals such as tapirs, horses, roosters, and bulls.3 Lucho's funeral, in effect, became a space in which to play, to turn away from grief and embrace life. My life and Lucho's had already become intertwined in several ways. His wife and I had been friends for over a year. He also happened to be the uncle of Susana, my capricious 14year-old kitchen helper and constant companion. I had met Lucho only three days prior to his death. This encounter made the news of his death particularly unsettling to me, as someone who had just entered my social world had suddenly been wrenched from it. Lucho and I had been introduced at a neighborhood store. We had shared a beer while he talked to me about his job as the foreman at the Hacienda La Miranda's sawmill complex. He oversaw a team of nine 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 circumstances of her uncle's death. She and I had walked together to the deep ravine and watched while several men hauled out Lucho's limp body. Don Tatamuez, the local sheriff, had come from the county seat in order to confirm the death and examine the body. After half an hour of examination, he turned to the crowd and reported that Lucho might well have slipped into the ravine accidentally. According to Tatamuez, Lucho had apparently suffered a concussion as a result of receiving a sharp blow to the left side of his head. Itseemed possible that when Lucho fell, his head had struck against some rocks protrudingfrom one side of the ravine. Following this pronouncement several men, including the sheriff, hoisted Lucho's body onto their shoulders and accompanied his family members back home. At the wake, I was surrounded by neighbors and friends. Many members of the peasant community had gathered together to mourn Lucho's passing. His death seemed particularlytragic. Lucho was only 36 years old, he was the father of five children, and his wife, Barbara,was pregnantwith another child. In addition, certain aspects of his death made no sense. Inthe days that followed this unhappy event, there was a great deal of uneasiness whenever his name became the topic of conversation. Most people were puzzled as to the actual cause of his untimely death. Although there was a great deal of talking, there were no readily available explanations. During the wake, I reflected on some of the rumors that had been circulating in the community. How could one account for this mysterious death? Based on the way in which his body had landed in the ravine, one or two individuals agreed with the sheriff's speculation that he might have slipped and fallen from one of the mud footpaths. Many argued that this would have been even more likely had he also been drinking. But according to the coroner's report that was issued several days after the discovery of the body, there were no indications of intoxication. Others said that someone might have pushed Lucho into the ravine afterdarkon Friday. Susana told me that her mother believed that Lucho's death might have been the result of sor-

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cery due to envidia (envy). When I asked her to explain this further, she said that one had to consider Lucho's relatively young age, his high position in the hacienda work hierarchy, and the fact that he had many material possessions. I had visited their home on several occasions and never been particularlystruck by a large number of consumer goods, but Susana argued that there were others in Quimsa, particularly co-workers, who were jealous of his apparent an electric success. "Don't you see?" she asked. "His house was painted, he had a refrigerator, blender, and a cassette player, and he also had pigs." According to Susana, the envious person might have pushed Lucho into the ravine or, more likely, have sought the aid of a shaman in orderto cast a spell on him. Susana contended that the envious person bewitching Lucho would have 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 person being bewitched, and after a spell has been cast it is placed in the pathway of the enemy. Ifthe enemy passes close to the muneca he 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 bewitched objects. Peasants generally regard the exchanging of food as a symbol of reciprocity and 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, bewitched food (typically consisting of eggs, bread, and roasted guinea pig) is marked by a shaman's spell and 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 with bewitched 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 one within the next few days, then the bewitched object may be recalled and eventually be interpreted as the source of this new misfortune. Susana and other peasants suggested that additional factors might have heightened Lucho's vulnerabilityto bewitchment of this sort. Lucho had, after all, evidently been wandering alone at night, near the principal ravine of Madre de Dios. The combination of these three factorsthe ravine, solitude, and nighttime-presaged danger. In folk cosmology, geography has an importantmoral dimension, and many places that form part of the natural landscape are believed 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 as ravines, irrigationcanals, 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 particularly dangerous for women to walk alone; cf. Brow 1990.) Individuals who are exposed to any combination of these circumstances run the risk of incurring folk diseases such as mal aire (evil wind) and susto (fright).Diseases such as these can be diagnosed and cured only by curanderas, or shamans, and not by practitionersof Western medicine. Thus, multiple interpretationsof Lucho's death-interpretations that were not always mutually 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),I asked Rosa what more she had heard. She looked at me, lowered her voice, and said, "Keep this a secret. 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 Barbaraand some of her closest female relatives were now 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."

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At that point we headed off to visit Barbara,whom we found in tears. We stayed for several hours, attempting to offer companionship, and we talked about the difficulties she would have in supporting the family without Lucho. At one point, Rosa looked knowingly at Barbaraand told her that she had mentioned something to me about devil possession. Barbarathen raised her 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." Barbarabelieved 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 over Lucho. While Barbaradidn't entirely dismiss the sheriff's speculation that her husband might have 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 Saturday morning), she paid little heed to this idea.5 She felt that her husband's death was rooted in a much 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, is Barbara'sstory: At the time that Luchowas made head of the sawmillworkgang,he was also assigneda positionas Inorderto keepan eye on the imported caretaker of the hacienda's forestreserve.6 at private machinery the sawmilland to makesurethat no one pilferedfromthe patrones' forest,Luchobuiltthis home for ourfamilyon haciendaland,close to the sawmill.Luchohad all these responsibilities: he was always agitated, alwayswatching,alwayskeepinghis guard,as he was concernedthatsomeone mighteither stealor damagethe sawmillmachineor takethe reallyimportant felledtimber from wood, the recently the forestreserve, at night.He also had his dutiesas the overseerof the workgang, with nine men under his supervision who were occasionallyjealousof his positionand his demands.Andthen our house, which Luchobuilt here, near the forest,was too isolatedfrom others,from our neighborsand our families. 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 would always say the same thing: "Are you looking for me? Don't bother me." Then he would lie back down and drift back to sleep. The voices would come again later in the night, only this time Lucho would frequently respond: "I'm coming!" At this point he would rise from bed, go outdoors 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. Barbarasaid that there were many nights 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, she and the children had ended up sleeping by the machine alongside Lucho. From time to time neighbors would tell her that they had heard the hum of the machine being turned on and off during the night and had wondered what was going on. Confiding in me, Barbarasaid that Lucho had become obsessed with his work. She whispered that he had been increasingly dominated by the spirit of the devil that had entered the sawmill machinery. Barbarahad frequently insisted that they move away from both the machine and the forest, but Lucho had always shrugged her off. Barbararegarded Lucho's nocturnal"conversations," which had continued for over a year, as evidence of a struggle between him and the dark forces, the devil. It had been the devil that had finally lured Lucho into the ravine that night and taken his life. Following this detailed account, I asked Barbaraand Rosa three questions. First,who in the community knew about Lucho's strange dreams? Barbararesponded that it was primarily her family, and Rosa mentioned that she had said something about them to her mother. Ithen asked if the devil possession version of Lucho's death had been suggested to the local patrones, the owners of the Hacienda La Miranda. I had seen the hacienda owners arrive at Barbara'shouse on that Saturdaymorning 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. Rosa immediately looked at me and said, "Oh no! No mention of this was made to them!" And even if the rumorwere eventually to reach them, she added, they certainly wouldn't take it seriously.

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The patrones had been told "another version," the version proposed by the sheriff. While the rest of my conversation with these two women left no doubt in my mind that they blamed the commercial farmersfor Lucho's death, they were not airing this conviction publicly. Finally, I asked whether cases of devil possession leading to death had occurred in Quimsa before. They both said yes and began to tell me two stories depicting similar sequences of events. The firstof these concerned a 32-year-old man, Ricardo Meno, who had worked as an irrigationcanal cleaner for the Hacienda La Miranda. Feeling faint one afternoon, he had laid down at home before going back to work in the pastures of La Cocha (a field adjacent to the northeastboundary of the Hacienda LaMiranda).When he closed his eyes he dreamed that he saw the foreman of LaCocha supervising the construction of two new reservoirsthat the owners of the Hacienda La Miranda were having built there near the milk station: a large bulldozer was 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 reservoirswere filling up with 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. Afterthis, Ricardowoke from his dream and recounted it to his wife. He rose with the intention of returningto work, but he was weak and his wife put him back in bed. Laterthat night he died. The other narrativecentered on a death that had occurred shortly after the construction of a new 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 territoryso that big truckscould enter this area to get lumber out of the forest more readily. The master-carpenter of the hacienda, Jorge Recalde, was responsible for the heavy machinery being used and for the construction team, which included several day laborers. Rosa was cooking the noon meals for 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-carpenter 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-carpentertold the others to continue working. When the bridge was finally finished late that afternoon Alberto would not 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 to get him home. Several months later a tractordriver, Santiago Chaleco (a local peasant), was going along this new road on his way to plow one of the hacienda's wheat fields. After he crossed the bridge, his tractorslipped down the edge of the muddy embankment, killing him instantly. A peasant woman who had been nearby said that the devil had taken control of the driver and his machine. It was because of the devil's possession that Santiago had been unable to jump off the machine and save himself. Rosa and Barbarasaid that Alberto's devil visitation had portended disaster-it had, for example, signaled Santiago's impending death. Both women stated that the bridge and road should never have been completed. They also expressed a great deal of uneasiness 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 accounts, Rosa and Barbararemarked that they fully expected furtherdeaths from devil possession to occur in association with these sites. They argued that no one should continue to work at the sawmill, and Barbaraannounced that she and her children were going to leave the house by the forest.

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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 versions of Lucho's death reflect the complexity of the local social reality from which they emerged.8 One version proposes that Lucho's death was an accident, another concludes that it 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 particularcontext and was directed to a particular audience. The first version was the "official explanation" peasants gave to outsiders and nonpeasants, the second, the one they told among themselves. The heterogeneity of the various versions reflects not only the general factors of gender and class but also the specific personal experiences, 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 of the 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 some extent woven into the women's stories. For example, while privileging devil possession as the cause of Lucho's death, Barbara'sstory allowed for a certain degree of ambiguity, and neither Barbaranor Rosa rejected the possibility of multiple causality. Barbararecognized that the sites of Lucho's workplace and of their home had made her husband vulnerable to spirit attacks. In addition, she mentioned that once Lucho's bouts with the devil began, he had startedoperating the sawmill machine alone and at night, both dangerous states. Finally, Lucho's body had been found in an ominous place, a ravine. Such evidence suggested a cosmological basis for Lucho's initial vulnerability to devil possession. Barbara'sremarksabout the occasional jealousy of Lucho's co-workers, furthermore,offered supporting evidence for the "envy version" of Lucho's death and lent plausibility to the notion that a fellow peasant might have been practicing witchcraft against him. This version pointed to inequalities within the peasant community and emphasized Lucho's identification with the interests of the landed elite. Focusing on these stories of devil possession will allow us to illuminate more general concerns, as this case can be compared with other cases illustratingthe social significance of devil or demon possession for recently proletarianized groups. By examining these stories both as explanations of Lucho's death and as a metaphor for the materialchanges that have transformed everyday life in Quimsa during the past three decades, we can shed light on the cultural meanings female peasants currently attributeto wage work.

devil-lore in comparative and historical perspective


Iwould like to posit that contemporary Quimsefo discourse about the devil serves as a coded political language for peasant women and that it is through this discourse and related imagery that local identity is consolidated. Seen in this light, sustaining cultural identity and difference vis-a-vis the dominant elites is a political act that does not require that these women be overtly conscious of their role as political actors (cf. Kane 1986). Ideas about the local devil, presently circulated by women, inform Quimseno notions of group identity and construct boundaries between peasant self and dominant other. In the contemporary setting the devil serves as a metonym for foreign technology, Western styles of development, and commercial farming. In this portionof the analysis I begin by comparing the local manifestations of devil-lore with those discussed by Nash, Ong, and Taussig. I then present evidence indicating that the devil has figured as a central element in the Quimsefio historical consciousness and is embedded in a

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particular local history of social relations; earlier devil-lore, too, sustained notions of group identity 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 was not native to the religions of the New World. Rather,the Christiandevil was brought by Spanish colonizers and was superimposed on the indigenous cultures through a process of "forced acculturation." In its new context, the quintessential figure embodying the forces of evil in Western metaphysics was incorporated into native cosmological schemes. In his analysis of devil beliefs in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, Taussig argues that the devil is intimately connected with the process of proletarianization: withthe devil [byhidinga mufeco in a field Maleplantation sometimesmakesecretcontracts workers at work]in orderto increaseproductivity, and hence theirwage. Furthermore, it is believedthatthe and in greatpain. [Taussig individual who makesthe contractis likelyto die prematurely 1980:94] 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 peasantsand women, even when engaged in proletarian labor, do not make such contracts at all (Taussig 1980:97). He maintains that it is only as former peasants become landless wage laborers, working on sugar plantations or in the Bolivian mines, that the devil assumes such importance in the consciousness of the ruralunderclasses. 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 ritualofferings that Bolivian tin miners make to the tio, the devil-like figure whose spirit controls production in the tin mines: these offerings are made in order to ensure high mineral yields and to prevent fatal mining accidents (Nash 1979:122). 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 Valley devil, 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 indigenous critique of wage labor. Instead, she maintains that the miners' perceptions of the tio are ambivalent, 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 spiritualbeings with qualities of the Christiandevil. By reinforcing a shared sense of history, Nash argues, such rituals foster solidarity and thus help to combat the alienation workers feel in the work setting (Nash 1979:319-320, 325-330). Parsons' 1945 ethnographic study of the neighboring Ecuadorean community of Peguche also 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. Harris1980). These spirits were associated with all work projects involving a transformationof the landscape, such as the construction of a bridge or an irrigationcanal. Exertinga controlling power over the work, duendes had to be propitiated with ritual offerings so that the project might reach completion. Like the tio of the Bolivian mines, the duendes often hungered for human 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 complete the bridge, they had a young Indian day laborerthrow into mid-river "six combos (stonemason's hammers), twelve new-handled shovels, 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 were offered 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. In either case, Parsons'description provides recent historical perspectives from which to analyze

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the Quimsa material, since in all three Quimsefo stories, the devil's possession of male workers occurs in association with a transformation of the landscape dictated by the new economic requirementsof local commercial farmers. Applying the logic of Parsons' analysis to the case in question here, we might argue that for the Quimsehos, the recent deaths of male workers also 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 proceeds at an unbridled rate and human reciprocity with both the land and the spirits is no longer deemed 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 and also presents importantpoints of contrast. These incidents of spirit possession also occur in the work setting; however, the victims are not men but young female workers. Workers relate attacks 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 schedules in the Malay factories are often disrupted by these spirit attacks. Ong "reads" the imagery of spiritpossession as factory women's unconscious protest against the form male authority takes in the gender-structuredworkplace. 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 narrativesreveal that cases of devil possession have not occurred in association with peasant forms of production. This dovetails with Taussig's (1980) findings about the devil compact in the Cauca Valley. By way of contrast, however, the present case indicates that devil-lore was an important element of peasant discourse about class relations and 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 devil was initially a mercantilist one. Unlike Taussig's proletarians, who had once been an independent landholding peasantry, the Quimsa peasants have had a lengthy historical relationship with a superior landowning class that appropriates peasant labor. This asymmetrical relationship has provided the materials necessary for the construction of a subaltern discourse in which the devil emerges as a central figure. As early as 1850 the bulk of all available land in the parish was monopolized by a few large estates, and peasants gained usufruct rights to this land by performing 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 household use, social relations at the point of production were not capitalist in form, and hacienda laborers, who still had access to land, could not be considered partof a ruralproletariat(Crain1989). Servile relations of production remained in effect on the large estates until the local agrarian reform 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 of land. In the peasant lore of the labor tenancy period, the devil image marked the landed elite as a particulargroup and fostered an awareness of the social differentiation separating their way of life from that of the peasantry. In Quimseio oral histories the boundaries of the Hacienda La Mirandaare often referredto as the route traveled by the devil, and particularareas inside the estate, such as LaCocha, are said to be haunted. Several women told me that even prior to the construction of the one-lane public road in 1940, peasants returning from the Ibarramarket some 17 kilometers away would always make sure that they got past La Cocha before 5:00 p.m. Ifthey could not get past by that time, they would wait to returnhome the following day. According to one woman, if you crossed this area during la mala hora (the wrong hours of the day) devil-like bulls stuffed with money would appear before your very eyes. Implicit in this association of the devil with hacienda geography is the notion that the hacienda's boundaries

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mark a realm distinct from the community of Quimsa peasants, a realm of undomesticated nature and of the supernatural. In other historical narratives the devil is associated with peasant ideas about the colonial elite, hacienda production, and buried treasure. This image is constructed as antithetical to Quimseio concepts of reciprocity and proper personhood. Peasant discourse about the devil in oral histories often contains implicit critiques of class relations, which peasants level against both the traditional landlords and hacienda production in general. One commonly reported narrative 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 of this order were rich men who, not content with accumulating silver and gold (which they buried on their property),also kept a large store of Inca ceremonial jars. One version of the story holds that in the timeof the ChurchFathers, if you saw a fireburning unattended on a moonlessnightat ElCisne, it wasa suresignthatthe devilwas there,andthe onlythinghe could be doingwas burning thatmoney. Andtherewas a littlelizard,andshe was alwaystherenearthe fire.Shewas the guardian, caringforthe one night,unattended, and he money.Now a local man [a peasant]lookedout and saw a fireburning knewthatthiswas a signthattheremustbe moneythere.Thismanwas acquisitive, wantingto get the haddone, even thoughhe knewthatthiswas evil andthatthe moneyforhimselfas the ChurchFathers devil mustbe there.So the next nighthe went alone to dig up the money. He foundthe lizardsitting nearthe spotwherethe firehad burnedthe nightbefore.As he was digging,his pickax beganto ring, and this ringing was the soundof the gold coins thatwere burieddeep in the earth.Butthis manwas to takethis moneyall by himself,and the nextday he was stricken feverfrom bad,trying by a terrible whichhe neverrecovered. This narrativedraws attention to the power of the invisible world that the devil inhabits, and its central 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 story ends with the proviso that it is acceptable for peasants to go and dig up the Inca jars, as the jars are partof their Indian patrimony, but that the remaining treasure must not be disturbed. Thus, the accumulative tendencies that characterized the lifestyle of traditional landlords are rejected. This oral history has important similarities to Lucho's story of devil possession, but it also departs from that story in several ways. Unlike Lucho, the protagonist of this narrative is not a known figure but an anonymous person. However, the protagonist is again a male subject in a solitary state who is lured by the possibility of acquiring wealth. This male figure becomes the focal point of community attention. The narrative is related to a whole corpus of folk legends from this region that chastise the kind of greed and profiteeringthat can threaten the welfare of an entire community. Both this narrative and Lucho's story can be analyzed in light of the "decentering of the subject" and privileging of the social that Jameson (1981:124-125) finds particularly characteristic of "magical narratives."Such preindividualistic narratives"emerge from a social world in which the psychological subject has not yet been constituted as such" and in which the distinction between public and private experience frequently does not exist. Unlike the narrative describing buried treasure, which more closely corresponds to the genre of magical narratives, Lucho's story recounts the plight of a "centered subject," an individual perilously beyond the influence of the "social." Lucho violates various community norms, such as not working at night, and as a result of his obsession with work, he becomes still furtherdisconnected from the community. Lucho's story also bears messages of conflicting sign-systems. Jameson (1981:95) regardssuch conflicts as traces or anticipations of different modes of production. On the one hand, Lucho's story, like the tale of buried treasure, is the product of a world of precapitalist meanings, where magical spirits still play a vital role in constituting reality and peasant "common sense" does not assign heavy machinery and wage work an entirely taken-forgranted status. However, Lucho's story is also derived from a social world in which peasant labor has become more fully commoditized and capitalism has increasingly eroded the older forms of collective life. While I would argue that Lucho's body, positioned alone by the ma-

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chine, indexes the emergence of commodity reification as the new hegemonic tendency in the local scene, these stories of devil possession, and the peasant women who occupy their margins, figure as a central metaphor for collective concerns. In their efforts to pull men away from the work site, peasant women are the decentered subjects who bear traces of a precapitalist mode of apprehending the world. Their stories express the women's desire for change and for the restorationof 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 inanimate objects, and a person who encountered these objects could become ill or susceptible to the devil's control. Forexample, several informantsexplained that the devil could momentarily enter and leave waterfalls and irrigationcanals. They also explained that the devil could assume the form of an animal-a bull, a lizard, a black dog-or of a person, known or unknown, such as an abandoned infant crying in the road. Just as the traditional cosmology posited that the devil could enter irrigationcanals, peasants today believe that he can penetrate newly introduced Western commodities (cf. Gottlieb 1986). Thus, individual deaths that are related in some way to the use of heavy machinery, to construction, or to wage work are described as the devil's handiwork. For the QuimseRo peasantry, large machinery and heavy equipment (tractors, bulldozers, harvesters,sawmills) are symbols of capitalist farming. These peasants had rarely encountered any type of heavy machinery before the 1940s, when equipment was first imported by multinational firms such as International Harvester and John Deere. Over the next three decades farmoperations were progressively mechanized. Commenting on the arrivalof the firstbig machines, one hacienda owner explained that since these machines represented a large capital investment, estate owners usually brought in skilled employees from outside the region to operate them. This pattern has continued into the present period. As a result, many local peasants remain somewhat bewildered by such machinery and frequently attribute its inner workings to the devil. Gender differences are also significant with respect to machinery. While male peasants have in the course of their everyday work gained a nominal familiaritywith heavy equipment, female peasants know almost nothing about the technology used on the estates and by development teams (cf. Boserup 1970; Etienne and Leacock 1980). Moreover, heavy machinery is rarelyused 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 the majorityof peasants have title to land only in the form of smallholding units. Most of these plots are 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. Peasantsassociate the new machinery with the devil and often regardthese products of Western technology as an unnecessary evil. Perhaps this negative assessment will become clear if we examine it in light of its broader sociohistorical context. First, mechanization has undermined the need for the peasants' labor on many of the large estates of the parish and has dealt a deadly blow to their traditional means of livelihood. Second, as peasants lose their employment opportunities they fear the loss of other perquisites, such as the rightto rent pasture space and to draw upon the patron's name and fame as a form of symbolic capital-perquisites which are, in one way or another, tied to local wage work. Finally, changes in the material conditions of life have had profound effects on the structureof household relations, and they have forced individual peasants, particularlymen, to migrate in search of work. Rumorsabout efforts to further mechanize commercial farm operations fueled peasant discussions during the lengthy period of political mobilization that arose in 1983 (Crain 1988,

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1989). Those involved frequently referredto the peasant invasion of the neighboring Hacienda ElCisne some ten years earlier, when disgruntled workers and unemployed peasant youths had reportedlyvandalized or stolen various items of machinery. Local commercial farmersare quite aware that mechanization has become a volatile political issue, and they fear the possibility of collective action on the part of a peasant labor force displaced by furthermechanization. This fear is surely one of the factors informing their recent decision not to introduce imported milking 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 rathersmall one, that has installed milking machines. There is a large body of historical and contemporary literaturethat gives evidence of a similar antipathyon the partof agriculturallaborersto the new machinery that frequently accompanies capitalist expansion in the agricultural sector. During the 1830s, for example, proletarians in the 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 destroyed harvestersand threshing machines as well as other agriculturalequipment 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, or wooden clogs, into the works. While both male and female peasants in Quimsa often reject mechanization, at the level of the household it is women who determine which new products of Western technology will be accepted and which rejected. Constituting units of production and consumption, households are the most importanteconomic institutions in Quimseio peasant society, and today it is primarily women who are responsible for managing the household economy and for cultivating each household's subsistence plot. Many women feel the seductive appeal of new commodities that 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 certain 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." InitiallyI thought her remarkalluded to the possibility that packaged soups might be harmful to one's health since they contain chemical preservatives. However, I discovered later 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 they entail. The loss of household autonomy that results from new practices of consumption was particularly apparent during the spring of 1983, when inflationary pressures and hoarding drove the prices of many store-bought goods higher. At this point many peasant women sought to restricttheir household expenditures to a minimum and, where possible, to rely on their subsistence production. Such practices constitute an everyday form of resistance, designed to limit the intrusionsof the marketeconomy.

gender, politics, and heretical discourse


In stories told by female peasants, accusations both of envy and of devil possession link male workers with the capitalist farm economy. Yet these beliefs are not shared across cultural and class boundaries. Instead, most commercial farmers whom I interviewed tended to dismiss them 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 Ministryof Health and the Catholic church) to eradicate native traditions of healing and witch-

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craft,their actual social practices often conflict with their professed views. Several female peasants told me, for example, that they had been responsible for healing particular landlords in instances in which Western medicine had not proved effective. Similarly, Guerrero's study (1982) of peasant-commercial farmerrelations in the neighboring parish of Otavalo reveals that commercial farmershave recently had dealings with shamans from that area. In Otavalo a prosperous commercial farmer whose estate had been invaded by peasants from several nearby communities sought a reputed shaman in order to bewitch the peasant invaders, hoping thereby to regain control of what he considered "his" land. While not a believer himself, the estate owner was aware of the powerful hold that this particularshaman had on the local population. Rumorsof bewitchment, circulated by the farmer's henchmen, might induce peasants to abandon the contested terrain. Given a social climate that generally tries to repress such occult beliefs, Quimseno talk about devil possession or about seeing a shaman forms part of a suppressed, underground discourse (cf. Favret-Saada1980; Price 1983; Taussig 1987). During the course of my fieldwork, for example, I never once heard devil possession discussed in public. Instead, it was discussed informally, in privateconversations among women; communal laundering, embroidering circles, and healing sessions, in particular,drew the women together and served as importantchannels of communication for the entire community. In such settings the women frequently criticized the conditions of wage work on nearby commercial farms. Harding's study of a northern Spanish village directs attention to the way in which peasant women make strategic use of their verbal skills to shape public opinion and alter power relations in a community. Analyzing women's lack of access to institutional power, Harding argues that women's tongues are their most importantweapons and that "in gossiping, women are behaving politically because they are tampering with power.... Gossip is potentially a challenge to the male hierarchy" (Harding 1975:302-303). Talk about the devil in Quimseia women's informal groups was always marked by a change in intonation and prefaced by such comments as "reserve this" or "let's keep this between you and 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 kind of talk is also the result of powerful ideological sanctions, as there has been a forceful campaign by members of the local dominant class as well as representatives of state ministries to silence discourses of this kind (cf. Portelli 1981). While claims about devil possession may appear to the reader to be the wild fantasies of hysterical women, I must also point out that even the sheriff took them seriously. Appointed to his position by important political figures from outside the community, the sheriff was a man of indigenous origins who held several educational degrees and was quite knowledgeable about local and provincial politics. Upon encountering me one morning several days after the discovery of Lucho's body, he asked what rumors were circulating in Quimsa regarding the death. I told him that some people were suggesting that it might have been caused by devil possession. Instead of dismissing this idea, he admitted that he also thought devil possession might be the cause. At the same time, however, he argued that as an upholder of "the law" he could accord this answer "no weight," as there was no way the law could prove or disprove the existence of a pact with the devil. "In the eyes of the law," he commented, "there must be witnesses. But how can we have witnesses who can attest to the devil's machinations?" Although I had initially wondered why Barbaraand Rosa had decided not to confront Lucho's boss with "their version" of Lucho's death, I eventually came to see their behavior as a calculated act (cf. Price 1983). These women kept their talk semisecret because, they said, there was 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. Scott finds that the peasants often defer to members of the elite and take care not to speak dispar-

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agingly of their social superiors in public, thus avoiding reprisals. However, when they are in situations of relative privacy and among equals, in an "offstage context," they freely engage in gossip and character assassinations of the rich. In Quimsa, women chose to represent themselves to "the outside" with a story quite different from the version they circulated in the community. Among themselves they constructed a definition of what constituted "the real" that was in conflict with dominant definitions of the social world, but they protected themselves and kept on good terms with the landed elite by arguing in public that Lucho's death had been an accident. In the Quimseio case, such a strategy of public conformity worked surprisingly well. This became evident when I later discovered a most ironical twist to this story. It seemed that the patron had attempted to take some responsibility for Lucho's death after all. About a week afterthe death, Rosa informed me that he had paid a visit to Barbaraand told her that he would try to get life insurance benefits for her family by claiming that Lucho's death had been a work-related "accident." In studies of resistance movements in Third World societies where either state or landlord coercion has worked to stifle any overt political expression, Scott (1985) and Comaroff (1985) have noted that the defiance of subaltern groups often takes a disguised or coded form that outsiders may not immediately recognize as a form of protest. The significance of talk about the devil in Quimsa, the coded form of resistance considered in this article, is further compounded by the gender inflections that markthis discourse. Why do we find women ratherthan men associated with this discourse?9 Both cultural and historical factors help to explain why it is women who have become the purveyors of this clandestine discourse. As Harding (1975:284) has argued, "The words of women and men follow the lines of their work." In Quimsa, women's topics of conversation are often quite different from men's. While men are inclined to discuss agricultural matters, political issues, and jobs available outside the community, they rarelyspeak of family matters. By way of contrast, women's "work" and therefore their conversation tends to center on family life and associational ties. And it is generally women who preserve family genealogies and care for the dead. As we saw in Lucho's case, female peasants utterthe ritual laments and carefully lay out the bodies of the dead. Given this overarching preoccupation with the family, it seems logical that women would be the tellers of these tales of devil possession, tales that keep the memories of their dead relatives alive. Moreover, women's speech has traditionally been devalued in public settings, where gender hierarchies come into play and where men (male peasants as well as male members of the dominant class) tend to dominate discussion. Barredfrom full participation in formal politics and often reduced to silence in public settings, women have fashioned a distinct type of political language that draws on the devil idiom. Although the workplace is the site of struggle, the protest against it is being launched from the domestic sphere. Silverblatt's historical study (1980) of Andean women under Spanish rule analyzes the ways in which Spanish colonization affected the positions of native men and women and sheds light on certain aspects of the present case. Why is women's discourse expressed in a cryptic form? Why is it laden with devil imagery?And, finally, why is its critique most radical in its defense of community? Examining early Spanish colonial policy, Silverblatt (1980:176) indicates that while women held important political and religious roles during the pre-Columbian period, they were excluded from formal positions of power under Spanish rule. The new colonial elite transformed indigenous gender relations by strengthening ties between men in order to bind native society to Hispanic institutionalstructures,to the detriment of indigenous women. Silverblattalso finds that colonial officials attributed magical powers to native women and often accused them of being witches and of making pacts with the devil. As particular Indian men assumed positions of power as curacas (native political chiefs) in colonial institutions, many abused their power and betrayed their communities in pursuit of the individual gains afforded by the new system (cf. Spalding 1974). According to Silverblatt (1980:176), women frequently came to be seen as the "true representatives of Andean society" and as "the de-

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fenders of native tradition" against colonial incursions, even though this shadow society had to maintain an "underground existence," shielded from colonial surveillance. While Indian men were forced to occupy the interface between local community and colonial society, participating in obligatory corvee labor and assuming positions as political intermediaries, many native women could remain faithful to community traditions, serving as moral arbitrators. Several of the patternsoutlined in Silverblatt'sanalysis of the colonial period are perpetuated in a new guise today. Contemporarydiscourses of development in Quimsa, articulated by local commercial farmersas well as by state institutions, tend to marginalize women's participation in the modernization process. Promoting the acquisition of imported farm machinery, government loans, and new technical skills, these discourses are primarilyaddressed to male peasants, who constitute the "proper subjects" of development. Most development agents who visited Quimsa during 1982-84 promoted community work projects that enlisted the labor of young men. 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 of the community meetings I attended, members of development teams and certain local men made various derogatory remarksabout women, including statements to the effect that women came to these meetings only to gossip among themselves, knit, or nurse their babies. Women were obviously present at these meetings, but they tended to voice their opinions less frequently than men did. Why was this the case? There are various ways in which development agencies discourage women's participation. For example, knowledge of oral and written Spanish has become increasingly important for communicating with the state institutions that administer the majority of the development funds; however, Spanish literacy rates are lower for women than 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 the presence of outsiders is a positive act of resistance. Peasant women in Quimsa see male peasants as more ready than they to collaborate with "the outside," often without fully considering the 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 community secrets and shielding Andean traditions from colonial surveillance. It also parallels my observation that indigenous women strategically avoid discussing devil possession with outsiders and nonpeasants. The following case illustratesmy point. InApril 1983 several women accused the acting vice-president of Quimsa, a man named Caesar Pilas, of revealing community secrets and of jeopardizing the political interests of the majority of Quimsenos. This man had taped the minutes of a recent community meeting in which Quimsefnos discussed the feasibility of taking over the Hacienda La Miranda. This meeting had been held at night, with outsiders and persons of superior social status excluded from attendance. The following Saturday, three women found Caesar drunk in a corner of the community football field, his cassette-player blaring out the meeting's heated discussion. These women were horrified to see that the administratorof the hacienda had stopped to chat with someone and was within hearing range of Caesar's broadcasting. Later,Caesar was overheard alluding to the meeting in a conversation with one of the hacienda's foremen. Immediately, attacks on his behavior began to circulate in women's gossip networks. He was socially ostracized, accused of being careless and of serving as a spy for the patron, and eventually denounced publicly-by women-in community meetings. Caesar was eventually forced to resign from his position as vice-president of the community, largely as a result of politics and power struggles originating in women's domestic domains. 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 times I saw women feign ignorance when questioned by external authorities making brief visits to the community. In several cases I knew that a particular woman was knowledgeable about the topic of inquiry and might well have answered the question, but heard her respond instead: "I

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don't know about these things, senor. You will have to ask my husband." Usually the husband was conveniently away at the time. Women's discourse about the devil is a counterdiscourse to the authoritative statements regarding modernization marshalled on behalf of commercial farming interests. This counterdiscourse runs alongside, and at times converges with, a male political language of class (cf. Joan Scott 1988). The focus here on women's voices should not be understood to imply that male peasants are fully complicit with existing class relations and the emerging forms of capitalist development 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, it must 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 inside and outside the community, while women's critical discourse, which also has political dimensions, 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 participationin public assemblies and their nomination to formal positions of power at the local level, thus promoting new constructions of "male" and "female" (cf. Harris 1980).'0 While men 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 domain. Despite the fact that certain development agencies persist in ignoring this shift, it is not too 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. Rogers 1975). Women's symbolic power in the community has traditionally resided in their positions as healers and witches, and more recently they have begun directing this power toward the political arena, albeit in a coded form. Although devil possession per se was never openly discussed in the formal political meetings I attended, both men and women used the devil idiom to refer to the local patron, the owner of the nearby Hacienda La Miranda. Female peasants often avoided pronouncing the patron's name in public and referredto him simply as a cuco, or devil-like figure. Several of the most vocal participants during the political mobilization of 1983 were women who were respected healers, midwives, and witches. In one of these political meetings, a senior woman and noted curer compared the coming of the large-scale machinery purchased by the commercial farmersto the arrivalof the mata-doctores (killer-doctors) of the Western medical tradition. She emphasized that her only doctor was the nettle, a common medicinal plant, which she could use perfectly well by herself or with the aid of another curandera. Women who occupy positions as witches and healers have been regarded as "threatening"and as "troublemakers" by development teams and contemporary commercial farmers.11 Campaigns to wipe out these folk practitioners by replacing them with various forms of Western medicine have a lengthy history in the parish. Positioned at the margins of the structures of global capitalism, these women are, I would argue, in a privileged position to launch a 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 critique of existing class relations and that women have represented the new economic system in a negative light. In this section I examine the differential impact of capitalist expansion on men and women (cf. Deere 1977). I begin by introducing information about women's experience of materialchange, informationthat should help to explain the gender-specific opposition expressed in these accounts. The traditional tenancy system, which prevailed on the estates through the early 1960s, was based on the labor power of the entire peasant family. Women worked alongside men in ag-

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riculture, and they predominated in milking and domestic service. On the large farms today, however, women are generally excluded from agriculturallabor. Their exclusion is largely the result of two related trends. First, there has been a reduction in the number of employment opportunities 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 agriculturalsector 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 household in carrying out certain aspects of his wage work. Women's labor is accorded less value than men's and so women receive less pay for their work. Moreover, the majorityof female laborers do not receive any fringe benefits such as medical insurance or social security pensions. Holding 85 percent of the positions at the Hacienda La Miranda, male workers are more fully integrated into the commercial farm economy than are women. Furthermore,only men occupy those positions of authority,such as overseer, that are particularlyimportantin the reproduction of the hierarchical class structure. Work defines who a man is, and today it is primarily "wage work" that is a crucial element in 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 community, and her work is perceived to be a derivative of these relations. The greater valorization of the male worker, attested to by his ability to attain high positions in the work hierarchy and to earn fringe benefits denied to the female worker, promotes a male identification with the commercial farmenterprise that many women lack. Estateowners as well as peasant overseers tend to view female workers with a certain degree of suspicion and skepticism. The commercial farmerswhom I interviewed complained that they had greater problems with their female labor force. I was told that the milkmaids in particularwere 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 farms has declined while men's has stayed relatively constant. This change is due in part to the commercialization of women's artisanal production. While women have traditionallyembroidered clothing and other items for use in the home, they are now producing embroidered goods for sale in extralocal marketsas well.12 Many women combine artisanal production with part-time wage work on commercial farms, but they are frequently able to earn more cash by selling their embroidered goods than by dairying or domestic work. Indeed, the income they generate from artisanalproduction sometimes surpasses that of male peasants who work as common day laborers.13 Artisanal production allows these women a certain degree of flexibility and control over the pace of their work, and because such production is based in the home, it is compatible with child care and the completion of women's other domestic chores (cf. Nash 1986). As the lowest paid and the firstto be reassigned to new positions, many women accord their part-timewage work a very low priority. I often heard remarkssuch as "If I can make twice as much by embroidering a tablecloth, why should I worry about showing up for work at milking time?" Milking demands punctuality, and male overseers are often frustrated when upstart milkmaids fail to appear at the appropriate hour. While the women's stories examined here associate the figure of the devil with commercial farming, on the commercial farms women themselves are frequently accused of being the devil's accomplices. The overseer of the La Cocha milk station charged peasant milkmaids with bewitching him as well as the livestock of the Hacienda La Miranda. Arrivingone morning at the milk station, he found voodoo dolls in the cows' feed troughs and immediately held the milkmaids suspect. Not wanting to touch these items himself, he ordered the women to get rid of them at once. One milkmaid who had been privyto all this told me: "We laughed, and while the overseer was busy inspecting several

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newborn calves we took the voodoo dolls and cast them into the Calina, a nearby lake." It is believed that magical spells cast on items thrown into this lake cannot be cancelled, for the lake is reputed to have no bottom and, therefore, no end. Such practices undermine the foreman's ability to maintain order in the workplace, and they have a disruptive effect on dairy production in general (cf. Ong 1987). One foreman, furious with the chaos that rumors of bewitchment had created in the workplace, was reported to have said that he would prefer that no women work in dairying. The new economic possibilities provided by the sale of their artisanalproducts have afforded women 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 commercial farmcontrasts sharply with the male peasants' increasing subjugation to wage work and its deleterious consequences. In the narratives presented here, it is women who attempt to pull men away from wage work and to protect them from the dangers it poses. The peasant "imaginary" 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 the new culturalvalues, patternsof work-discipline, and standardsof consumption consonant with the new mode of production are confirmed by these stories and by the supporting evidence of several examples. In the firststory, women's opposition to both the lengthening of the workday and the accelerated rate of wage work is registered in Lucho's constant preoccupation with his work. Inthis text, Lucho's body and spiritbecome, in essence, mere appendages of the sawmill machine. In the third narrative,women's objections to new standards of work-discipline and to the form male authority takes in the workplace are evinced when the protagonist, Alberto Escola, 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 peasant subjectivity, so that peasants come to regardthe wage form as "natural"and wage work as "a calling," these stories construct images of the commoditization of labor that equate wage work with 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 which women project their concerns about the preservation of life and the destiny of their community while simultaneously negating the dominant meanings assigned to wage work (cf. Franco 1985). Another common thread running through these narrativesis their opposition to capitalism's radical reshaping of the natural landscape, a reshaping that conflicts with Andean cosmological 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 relations of production this balance has been distorted, as nature has become a commodity, pried loose from the norms of reciprocity and increasingly subjected to human domination and rational control.15Forthe tellers of these tales of devil possession, this constant making-over of the landscape-this enclosing and privatizing of forests and pastures, this paving of roads and building of bridges-has been a harbingerof death.

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

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supreme and in which material objects wax large and people small-or, in Rosa's idiom, in which "persons [such as Lucho] are often sacrificed for things." By focusing on the different "versions" of Lucho's death, I have demonstrated the complexity of local social reality, a reality in which multiple causation is frequently invoked to explain events. Furthermore,by examining the various versions, I have, I hope, illuminated the ways in which peasant ideology and politics are constructed and have pointed to conflicting interpretationsof the development process. I have argued that aspects of peasant cosmology, as wel I as class and gender ideologies, are inscribed in these accounts and work to resist the process of commodification. Peasant spirits, such as the devil, and cosmological beliefs about inauspicious places and times of day haunt workers and their respective work sites. Such cosmological 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 resistance 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 back in time and shown that the devil served as an idiom for talking about local class relations under the labor tenancy system. In contrast to the Cauca Valley devil-lore, which Taussig (1980) interpretsas 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 informal domains. It insists that we cannot ignore the gender dimension that shapes the production of this counterdiscourse about the devil. I have drawn attention to the ways in which gender constructs politics-and vice versa-by underscoring the fact of women's marginalization in the realm of official political discourse, and I have demonstrated women's construction of an alternative political language. Focusing on women's statements of resistance in discourse as well as women's everyday acts of resistance to both commercial farming and Western styles of development, this article demonstrates that female peasants in semiprivate contexts confront public issues-namely, the politics of the workplace. Itseems appropriatethat it is women, and not men, who are the storytellers and who launch this 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 wage work. Thus women, who derive their primary sense of identity from their relations to others and who serve as cultural mediators between the living and the dead, tell these stories about the deaths of significant others, deaths that have taken a dramatic toll on life in 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 narratives described here, then, women are turning the discourse of the dominant group back on itself. 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 critical gaze toward us (cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986; Taussig 1980, 1987). They speak, if indirectly, to problems faced by advanced capitalist societies in the industrialized West, where spiraling urban growth and ecological crises, not to mention nuclear disasters, threaten our daily lives. The women's narratives also challenge those received categories that order and constitute social reality in the West. Laden with dream imagery and encounters with the "invisible world," these stories draw on local forms of knowledge that render meaningless the distinctions between categories such as "the imaginary" and "the real" that are so persistently maintained in the West (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Silverman 1983).

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Lucho'sdeath disruptedthe taken-for-grantednatureof everyday life and called into question the routines of wage work. His death called up stories of other deaths, and the ensuing conversations allowed those who had known him to reflect on largerchanges taking place in their world. Through these stories and conversations, peasant women were attempting to reshape a society increasingly menaced by forces perceived as being beyond their control. The stories are 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 of the sawmill turning, emerges the muffled sound of women's voices disrupting attempts to redefine the meaning of work in their community.

notes
Shorter versionsof this articlewere deliveredat the 46th International of Acknowledgments. Congress Americanists held in Amsterdam in July1988 and at the 87th annualmeetingof the American Anthropoheld in Phoenix,Arizona,in November1988. Thearticleis basedon fieldwork underlogicalAssociation takeninthecommunity of Quimsainthe northern of Ecuador from 1982 through highlands January January 1984. Funding was providedby the DohertyFoundation at Princeton and by the Institute of University Latin American of Texasat Austin.Ithank Studies at the University JamesBrow,ManuelDelfino,Stephanie VeraMark, for helpfulcommentson earlierverJuneNash,and MichaelTaussig Kane,Kristin Koptiuch, sions.Inaddition,I appreciate the commentsof the American editorsandanonymous reviewEthnologist ers. I aloneam responsible forthe finalcontentsof thisarticle.Iwould liketo dedicateitto the memory of who was dyingwhen Idid thisfieldwork. my grandmother, 'Thisarticle,writtenin an experimental the vein, is influencedby the New Ethnography, particularly workof James on ethnographic Clifford as allegory.Forfurther discussion of thisnew experimental writing momentin anthropology and relateddisciplines,see Clifford (1986a, 1986b) and Marcusand Fischer (1986). 2For further discussionof storytelling formsee Bruner and the narrative (1984), Franco (1989), Lyotard (1987). (1984),Mulvey(1987), Rosaldo (1980),andTaussig America eitherat wakesor duringperiodsof mourning areexaminedin Harris 3Games playedin Latin (1945). (1982),Nash(1979),and Parsons demonstrate a marked Salomon'sinvesti4Many aspectsof witchcraft degreeof historical continuity. indicatesthatdangerous gationof the politicsof shamanicpracticein late-colonialEcuador objectsbewitchedby nativeshamanswere found "in the doorways,hearths, watersources,and cattlepens of the victims"(1983:418).According to Salomon(1983:416),such magicalobjectswere often wrappedin a to as "diseasebundles." piece of cloththathad belongedto the victimandwere referred Iwas close factors. was, Ibelieve,facilitated First, 5Mystudyof devilpossession by at leasttwo important friends with Barbara and Rosa.Second,community members were awarethatI myselfparticipated in activitiesassociatedwith the occult: manyof them knew,for example,that I had had both myselfand my houseritually cleansedon severaloccasions. forestreserve(established ten yearsearlier) contained1.5 million 61n1982, the HaciendaLaMiranda and pine treeswith a totalvalue of 4 millionsucres.Treefarming is an important economic eucalyptus for manylargeestateowners in the parishtoday. Landnot suitablefor agricultural strategy purposesor is frequently since forestedlandis nontaxable. Inaddition, treefarming dedicatedto thisactivity, dairying enableslarge farmers to provethattheirlandis beingused"productively" andreducesthe chancesof state on behalfof peasantcommunities. farmers are quitecognizantof the politicalimpliexpropriation Large cationsof reforestation, for liningtheirestateswithtreesis a sureway to handle"theboundary problem" andthe competing claimsof nearbyIndian communities to this land. 7Black of haciendafarming. withoutwhom a dogs are emblematic Theyare the ominousgatekeepers traditional haciendawould not be complete.Peasants fearthembecauseof theirferocityandtheirsize. 8The of multiple versionsis also a discursive of presentation strategy designedto decenterthe authority the anthropologist assumesthe poand move analysisaway fromunivocity,in which the anthropologist sitionof authority the one "trueversion"(cf. Clifford 1986a, 1986b).Fordiscussionof mulby presenting in French feministtheoryand texts,see Moi (1985) and Irigaray tiple viewpointsas a discursive strategy (1985). 91 foundthatthe few men who did talkto me aboutthe local devil fell intoa specialcategory of "maleness"and sharedmany"feminine" Oftenphysicallydisabledand/orunemployed, attributes. these feminizedmenwere in the homeand in the companyof women morefrequently thanothermen were. fromthe community 1960 therewas littlepeasantmigration of Quimsa.Censusdatafrom1983 '0Before indicated an increasein the incidenceof female-headed of a totalof 305 householdsin the community: 26 percent,were headedby women at thattime. Thesedata insome 78, or approximately households,

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dicated that male heads of household had emigrated seasonally or on a permanent basis in order to find work elsewhere. Forfurtherinformation see Crain 1989. 1As Bovenschen (1978) has argued, healing restores psychic and mental balance in a way that Western medicine cannot and deals with a wide range of problems that Western medicine ignores. Backed by the Ecuadorean state, advocates of Western medicine take control over community health issues out of the hands of local practitioners and place it in the hands of "experts," who are tied to dominant institutions and are usually "outsiders" with respect to the community. '2The majorityof households engaged in commercial artisanal production depend solely on family labor. Other workshops, however, operate on a putting-out system. These shops provide the necessary cloth, thread, and other materials to women whom they pay according to a piece-work rate. '31ngeneral, only women embroider. There are, however, occasional exceptions to this rule. During one of my daily visits in Quimsa I stopped to chat with a very poor family, and I discovered that the male head of the household was secretly doing embroidery work for his wife in the dimly lit interiorof their home. '4Thesuccess of the new relations of production is not merely contingent on the fact that peasants today must sell their labor to the commercial dairy farms in order to make ends meet. In addition, it depends on a great deal of ideological work. PursuingMarx's observations, Taussig has pointed out that "the transition to the capitalist mode of production is completed only when direct force and the coercive force of external economic conditions are used only in exceptional cases. An entirely new set of traditions and habits has to be developed among the working class until common sense regards the new conditions as natural" (1980:22). '5Bovenschen has observed that, as "woman" has always represented nature in dominant mythological schemes in the West, under capitalism the domination of nature includes the domination of woman, and both "nature"and "woman" become "objects of appropriation." She argues that as our mastery of nature deepens, so does our fear of nature's revenge. Such revenge is often depicted as the retaliation of a destructive woman (Bovenschen 1978:106-111).

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submitted 25 October 1988 revised version submitted 3 August 1989 accepted 25 December 1989

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