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Reviews tagging 'Religious bigotry'
Calibano e la strega: Le donne, il corpo e l'accumulazione originaria by Silvia Federici
4 reviews
clovelatte's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Caliban notes. Just some main points I want to remember about what it was saying.
women’s bodies and labor as the new commons to make up for the loss of access to land and communal living. Nuclear family emerged to systematically disappear womens labor and isolate people so they are less able to organize
dissection of the body and breaking it down into working parts was necessary to force bodies into the unnatural capitalist work cycle. destroy the magic and the nature of the body and make it nothing more than a tool and then what are you to do with a tool but use it
magic is allowed to return now in pop culture because it is no longer a threat to capitalism. our society is so orderly and regimented that commodified magic is no threat.
LETTING THE SOFT ANIMAL OF YOUR BODY LOVE WHAT IT LOVES IS RESISTING
“The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which much social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body was gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. And it was here again that the scientific use of torture was born, for blood and torture were necessary to ‘breed an animal’ capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules.”
In places where land enclosures were not happening the witch trials were not present. Access to land has a community building effect on humans and once you remove people from the land it becomes easier to remove them from their rights and consideration for each other as a united whole.
Persecution in the Americas mirroring what was “perfected” in Europe as a way to break up organizers. Fear and suspicion of the neighbor as a means of bringing the other to order.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Colonisation, Sexual assault, Abortion, Slavery, Injury/Injury detail, Rape, Sexism, Misogyny, Suicide, Violence, Antisemitism, Torture, Cannibalism, Genocide, Religious bigotry, Classism, Medical content, Racism, and Sexual violence
krkvt's review against another edition
Incredibly well researched and well written, but very dry and hard to get through. It's fairly academic.
Content Warnings
Minor: Slavery, Religious bigotry, Misogyny, Colonisation, Rape, Violence, Sexism, Sexual violence, and Sexual assault
savvylit's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
During the late Middle Ages, European thought and philosophy shifted to a view of man as machine. This separation between body and mind created a larger cultural distaste for anything natural and animalistic. The church also reinforced these same ideas. Church and state united to encourage European people to think of their body as inherently sinful and to instead use their minds to avoid lazy or hedonistic behavior. Work was godly. Work was good. Work required disciplining your mind and treating your body like a tool. Thus, we have the dawn of assessing humans by their labor-power. The foundation for capitalism. Additionally, the church and state disdaining all things bodily made it so that women's traditional work and knowledge became necessary to destroy. Thus, the dawning of the witch-hunt.
"The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy their social power."
The witch-hunt was essential to early capitalism. So many of the harmful views that Western culture still retains were established during the witch-hunt era specifically to create and serve an increasingly labor-obssessed capitalist society. Not only that, but so much was lost. Unknown amounts of communal culture burned at the stake alongside the "witches." A culture of resistance, of healing & midwifery, of art, of feminine and collective power... It is incredibly unsettling to think of how little this literal and cultural genocide is studied in modern world history courses. I am so grateful that reading this book has allowed me to see how the intentional omission of this topic has allowed some of the worst aspects of witch-hunts to be perpetuated to this day.
I highly recommend this book. If you hate the patriarchy and hate capitalism then this book is for you.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Chronic illness, Violence, Torture, Sexism, Genocide, Religious bigotry, and Rape
amelreads's review against another edition
informative
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Torture, Misogyny, Racism, Colonisation, Violence, Sexual violence, Sexism, Religious bigotry, Medical trauma, Medical content, Murder, Genocide, Homophobia, Death, and Cannibalism
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