I’ve taken to raiding the lady wife’s divinity school bookcase – she’s accumulated some mindblowing reads in the last year.  I’m currently near the end of Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, an intense anthropology / sociology book that talks about the intersection of mysticism and myth with changing historical, political, and economic conditions in Bolivia and Columbia from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Apparently, in peasant regions of both countries, the dominant myth-structure for work on one’s own farm or on the farm of one’s neighbor is one of entreating divine support and exiling demons.  When these same people go to work in tin mines or on sugar plantations, though, the dominant myth-structure for work is Satanic.  Gods (both Catholic and local) rule personal production; demons and magic rule capitalist production.

It’s wild to see the same ideas I’ve been thinking about in Three Parts Dead and its sequel in a seminal anthro text!  I should send a copy of my book to Michael Taussig.  Writing life aside, I’ve never seen an account that treats so well on economics and myth as complementary realms of human experience.  Check this one out if you have a chance.