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fekete_macska 's review for:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
by Silvia Federici
What a mess of an essay that was... First of all, it would be truer to the content to reverse the order of the title in "primitive accumulation, women and the body", as two thirds of the essay are concerned with the economy of the middles ages. Federici never manages to successfully intertwine her themes to achieve a final product that makes its point based on all the different aspects that were broached: reading 130 pages on how the economy changed in the medieval period didn't enable me to better grasp the witch-hunt, since this chapter does not rely on the demonstrations from the previous chapter.
There is also this very frustrating impression that every chapter is an introduction for the following, with the promise of diving deeper in a subject, while this never happens. On the contrary, instead of diving deeper, Federici at best repeats herself, while sometimes completely contradicting a point made two pages ago (as is the case for her explanation for the end of witch-hunting).
Even more problematic is her tendency to overly quote other works, before bringing her own conclusion without any logic link with the argument made, and without any justification. There are some points that are dubious (she mentions the Great Plague twice, with completely different dates), and uses an unsubstantiated urban legend as the sure etymology of "Faggot". She also tends to turn some issues into complex ones and read some things into it when really, there was nothing much to prove (as with her final chapter, when she spend pages and pages explaining the witch-hunt in Latin America to conclude that all this argumentation could explain the coincidences in representation of witchcraft in Latin America and in Europe : as both representations and accusations were made by Europeans, I don't see why one should even wonder about the similarities?)
A truly disappointing essay that is blotchy, frustrating, and that never actually deals with its subject.
There is also this very frustrating impression that every chapter is an introduction for the following, with the promise of diving deeper in a subject, while this never happens. On the contrary, instead of diving deeper, Federici at best repeats herself, while sometimes completely contradicting a point made two pages ago (as is the case for her explanation for the end of witch-hunting).
Even more problematic is her tendency to overly quote other works, before bringing her own conclusion without any logic link with the argument made, and without any justification. There are some points that are dubious (she mentions the Great Plague twice, with completely different dates), and uses an unsubstantiated urban legend as the sure etymology of "Faggot". She also tends to turn some issues into complex ones and read some things into it when really, there was nothing much to prove (as with her final chapter, when she spend pages and pages explaining the witch-hunt in Latin America to conclude that all this argumentation could explain the coincidences in representation of witchcraft in Latin America and in Europe : as both representations and accusations were made by Europeans, I don't see why one should even wonder about the similarities?)
A truly disappointing essay that is blotchy, frustrating, and that never actually deals with its subject.