Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Similarities exist between the suppression of proletarian women in Europe and oppression of Indigenous populations in the Americas. Land expropriation occurred, social bonds dissolved, traditions suffered attack, and poverty took hold. Colonizers employed European methods of subjugation in the America and later “re-imported” them to Europe. Witch-hunting in the American colonies further indicates unified capitalist thought. For example, colonizers leveled accusations of diabolism at Indigenous populations. Witch-hunting was thus a tool,

used by authorities to instill terror, destroy collective resistance, silence entire communities, and turn their members against each other. It was also a strategy of enclosure which […] could be enclosure of land, bodies, or social relations (220).

Colonial witch-hunting, however, failed to annihilate Indigenous resistance or religious traditions thanks to Indigenous women’s efforts.

Spanish conquerors transported persecutory accusations they used against Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe to the Americas. Charging Indigenous peoples with diabolism, cannibalism, and sexual perversion allowed them to justify colonization and claim they were also Christianizing Indigenous groups. Spanish depictions of Indigenous people as naked cannibals are similar to depictions of the cannibalistic, orgiastic witches’ Sabbat in Europe.

In the mid-16th century the Spanish faced an Indigenous labor shortage. There were neither enough people to work in mining nor the workshops that refined goods. This shortage resulted in more extreme exploitation and efforts to wipe out Indigenous religions. For example, in Peru the Spanish attacked local idols and forcibly relocated Indigenous people to supervised villages where the Spanish had authority over their labor. Later attacks on local cults included witch-hunting that victimized Indigenous women. Authorities treated accused witches just as they did in Europe, including torturing them to get confessions. Additionally, social cohesion broke down just as in Europe. The colonial attack on traditional religions affected women negatively because before contact they played important roles in these religions. They were also folk healers and produced ritual goods:

But with the Spaniards’ arrival everything changed, as they brought their baggage of misogynistic beliefs and restructured the economy and political power in ways that favored men. Women suffered also at the hands of the traditional chiefs who, to maintain power, began to take over the communal lands and expropriate the female members of the community from land and water rights […] women were reduced to the condition of servants (230).

Women responded by gathering in places outside the reach of colonial authorities where they could maintain traditional rituals. In response, the Spanish attacked Indigenous religion and resistors to colonial rule with witchcraft accusations. Many of the women the authorities targeted were poor and elderly, just as in Europe. They were likewise charged with the same crimes as European witches, including lewd acts with Satan or flying. However, witch-hunting in the Americas failed to make the accused women social pariahs.

The American witch hunts declined as colonial security took hold in these newly conquered lands. Witch-hunting, however, did not vanish from the places European nations colonized: “the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies” where Indigenous peoples carried out persecutions against their own community members and continue to do so today (237). For example, Nigerian witch hunts have contributed to the degradation of women’s positions and occurred in conjunction with the growth of capitalism. Witch-hunting remains a signal of primitive accumulation’s persistence around the globe.