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.